UNDERCULTURE

(This was originally written for the Verge before those fuckers dropped me like a hot potatoe, with thanks to PWOT)

I am not much of a movie buff. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a film (I threw away my TV in 1996 and haven’t read a newspaper since then either). I spend much of a spare time reading and researching.

This is why I was slightly surprised, but honored, when I was asked to review Mel Gibson’s “The Passion: The Return of the Christ�. It also meant that I didn’t really have to watch the film, since I am well-versed in the Catholic Church’s 1675 publication of the Gospels, as well as Mel Gibson’s own commentaries.

As movie-goers well know, the movie is a faithful rendition of the passion of the Christ. This is a euphemism of course, first used by Pope Paul III in 1737 to refer to the torture and, ultimately, the death of the world’s first Christian martyr by the Jews of old Jerusalem. But don’t be fooled because there is, in fact, nothing passionate about it!

And I think that this would be the first of the many disappointments to any movie-goer: that the controversial sex scene between Jesus and his long-time lover, Mary Magdagaleno, was brutally cut to appease the sensors and get the crucial R16 rating Mel Gibson needed. It was also for this reason that they drastically reduced the beatings and torture scenes to cover a mere 95% of the film.

Elements like this are flights of fancy for director Mel Gibson who, time and again, chooses a more artistic and fanciful, rather than historically correct, rendition of the events. This is most obvious in the reduction of the biblical five-and-a-half-thousand lashes to a paltry forty-two. He goes further, though, deciding to show Jesus as dying on the cross instead of actually falling prey to massive internal hemorrhaging due to th erepeated groin kicks administered by his Norman captors. This was obviously taken to offer slight comedic moment from the otherwise grim and violent movie, as Monty Python had done so successfully in the early 1980’s. But, unlike that John Cleave classic, it fails to deliver even a slight chuckle.

In the movie’s defense, however, viewers are sure to be surprised by the miraculous comeback from one of the main characters. I’d tell you who it is, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

All in all, then, I give the movie, The Passion: The Return of the Christ, a mediocre score of 3 out of 10.