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More bad movie reviews
Feb. 24th, 2004 05:09 pmI know, it sounds like a Monty Python movie. You're thinking there must be something to The Passion of the Christ besides watching a man tortured to death, right? Actually, no: This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie—The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre—that thinks it's an act of faith.
- Slate, David Edelstein
Mel Gibson's film is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours that it succeeds more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it.
- New York Times
The movie is 126 minutes long, and I would guess that at least 100 of those minutes, maybe more, are concerned specifically and graphically with the details of the torture and death of Jesus. [...] Anyone raised as a Catholic will be familiar with the stops along the way; the screenplay is inspired not so much by the Gospels as by the 14 Stations of the Cross. [..] Gibson has not made a movie that anyone would call "commercial," and if it grosses millions, that will not be because anyone was entertained. [...]
Note: I said the film is the most violent I have ever seen. It will probably be the most violent you have ever seen. [...] If it had been anyone other than Jesus up on that cross, I have a feeling that NC-17 would have been automatic.
- Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert
Okay, the Ebert review is not a total pan. He gives it 4 stars. He also says, "I prefer to evaluate a film on the basis of what it intends to do, not on what I think it should have done."
- Slate, David Edelstein
Mel Gibson's film is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours that it succeeds more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it.
- New York Times
The movie is 126 minutes long, and I would guess that at least 100 of those minutes, maybe more, are concerned specifically and graphically with the details of the torture and death of Jesus. [...] Anyone raised as a Catholic will be familiar with the stops along the way; the screenplay is inspired not so much by the Gospels as by the 14 Stations of the Cross. [..] Gibson has not made a movie that anyone would call "commercial," and if it grosses millions, that will not be because anyone was entertained. [...]
Note: I said the film is the most violent I have ever seen. It will probably be the most violent you have ever seen. [...] If it had been anyone other than Jesus up on that cross, I have a feeling that NC-17 would have been automatic.
- Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert
Okay, the Ebert review is not a total pan. He gives it 4 stars. He also says, "I prefer to evaluate a film on the basis of what it intends to do, not on what I think it should have done."
