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38Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.
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30While it fails to shed significant new light on its subject, Gibson's film and the all-Jesus-all-the-time attention from the media it's attracted do tell us something somewhat disconcerting about the state of American culture: That the way to make a religion based on love and forgiveness relevant today is to turn it into violent entertainment.
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30By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. [1 March 2004, p. 84]
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25Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II. It is sickening.
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25From my perspective, the film's anti-Semitism is implicit rather than programmatic, and, in the film's current form, a little sneaky.
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25The visual big top is the scourging and the crucifixion -- again and again, Gibson returns to the blood-letting. Again and again, we're exposed to the clinical repetition of a single act, until an alleged act of passion comes to seem boring and passionless. Is that not a definition of pornography?
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20Gibson makes sure that no blow remains unfelt, and his approach can't help but stir the body, but he never touches the soul.
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20This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith.
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10If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 301 out of 492
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Mixed: 21 out of 492
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Negative: 170 out of 492
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SheilaD.5