Gospel is sheer torture

Mel Gibson's ponderous, abusive, and frankly rather hateful film The Passion of the Christ covers the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ, a Judaean who lived roughly 2,000 years ago, and who somehow got it into his head that he was the son of God.

The film begins with Jesus (played by suitably iconic James Caviezel) looking soulful in the Garden of Gethsemane with a handful of his disciples. Jesus is having divine revelations - although they could be mistaken for mild epileptic fits - when, tipped off by Judas Iscariot (Luca Lionello), thugs in the hire of the Pharisees pitch up, and he's dragged away to a kangaroo court in the Temple at Jerusalem, conducted by the vile high priest Caiphas (Mattia Sbragia).

Summarily found guilty, Jesus is handed over to the occupying authorities by his fellow Jews. He is initially shown some mercy by Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov), whose wife, Claudia, offers the Messiah a hand-wash and brush-up for his crown of thorns, but in the end political expediency means he must be punished with extreme prejudice.

There follows about an hour of the most excoriating cinema I can remember, as psychopathic Roman legionnaires scourge Jesus: first the blood flows, then the weals expand until yellowish fat oozes from them. This assault was so sustained and voyeuristic that most of the audience I saw the film with covered their eyes; and frankly, the crucifixion - at the end of a Via Dolorosa that saw our hero still further tortured - was a mere bagatelle.

In this film there is little or no attempt to put the myth of Jesus Christ in context. We get a few flashbacks: Jesus stops the stoning of Mary Magdalene (Monica Belluci), Jesus delivers a fragment of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus breaks bread for his disciples at their last supper. All of these afford great soundbites - Gibson has, after all, one of the best source books imaginable - but my favourite piece of Christ-like wisdom came when, briefly, we saw him in happier, humbler, carpentering times. Jesus puts the finishing touches to a radical new invention of his own, the table, then demonstrates it to his mother, Mary (Maia Morgenstern), by half-squatting and simulating eating. She looks at the young innovator with love admixed with pity and says: "It'll never catch on."

It's a great gag, and it gives the lie to what exactly The Passion of the Christ should be measured against. It is easy to see why in the US - where churchgoers comprise 50 per cent of the population, there is an aggressively politicised Jewish lobby and a born-again Christian is President - the Gospel according to Gibson would be a source of rich foment and even richer box-office receipts. But, thankfully, here in secularised Britain the film is competing against Monty Python's Life of Brian as a work of Christology, and against Return of the King as a piece of transcendent mythology.

Unlike our American cousins, most contemporary British filmgoers wouldn't be able to distinguish between the four Gospels if you paid them hard cash, let alone hazard an exegesis, so the disputes about Gibson's source material and the historical accuracy of his film are utterly arcane. For what it's worth, I think his rendition of Christ's message was pretty true to at least one valid interpretation of the Gospel, which sees all human flesh as innately sinful, the Jews as Christ-murderers, and the crucifixion as a theatre of cruelty mounted by the God of Agitprop.

I try to stay tolerant towards all faiths, but halfway through The Passion of the Christ, the wicked thought occurred to me that, far from being an exercise in anti-Semitism, part self-financed and wholly directed by the fundamentalist Catholic son of a Holocaust-denier ( which Gibson Snr undoubtedly is), the film was, in fact, funded by a secret cabal of Jews with the sole aim of utterly discrediting Christianity. Frankly, if you come out of this one wanting to worship in front of an effigy of a man nailed to a couple of twobyfours, then you need your head examined.

Doubtless if Gibson had the dosh he would have gone bigger on the special effects because, as it stands, the Lord God isn't a patch on Gandalf when it comes to miracle working. As for the almost uniformly Mediterranean cast of stained-glass lookalikes, well this is just one cliché among many, including - more perniciously - the Devil being a woman with a snake up her skirt, and the Romans having a good eye for minimalist interior decoration. If I believed in life eternal with access to a heavenly multiplex I still wouldn't advise you to see this film, but, as things stand, if thou goest anywhere this week, be it to see an honest piece of graven imagery, not this religiose rubbish.

The Passion Of The Christ
Cert: 18