According to director Mel Gibson, film critics from across the nation have proven their fealty with the dark lord Satan by panning his latest film The Passion of the Christ, a gruesome religious horror flick released to overwhelmingly negative critical response last week. This novel reaction to film criticism has raised questions nationwide over whether the 48-year-old actor and filmmaker is merely berserkly fanatical, or just completely insane. Not helping Gibson’s cause is the director’s non-figurative conviction that Satan tried to keep his film from being made, and might have succeeded if not for the intervention of the Holy Ghost. Unfortunately for Gibson, the Holy Ghost was unable to prevent Satan from pointing out to film critics the film’s turgid tone, plodding pacing, uneven characterization and excessively pointless violence.
“They are the forces of Satan or the dupes of Satan,” Gibson offered charitably, giving non-fans the choice of being either evil or stupid.
“Holy shit was that a bad movie,” disagreed Satan’s minion Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times, who must’ve been typing his review while drenched in lamb’s blood. “That piece of shit was worse than We Were Soldiers.”
The film opened to sellout crowds after months of speculation that it was going to be really offensive to Jews, generated by Gibson cashing in on his “Jews Killed Jesus” Catholic offshoot faith and his father’s reputation as a notorious Holocaust denier to market the film with the catchy tagline “The Jews Hate It,” despite the fact that no religious groups had seen or commented on the film at that point.
In interviews, Gibson has explained that his Traditionalist Catholic faith, which rejects the Vatican’s exoneration of the Jewish race for the death of Christ, grows from his bond with his father Hutton Gibson. In either a brilliant marketing ploy or disturbing evidence of inner turmoil, Gibson’s answers to requests to clarify his own stance on the Holocaust have been rambling and evasive.
Unable to go five whole minutes without saying something unnervingly kooky, however, Gibson’s response to New York Times writer Frank Rich’s article pointing out that the director was inventing nonexistent Jewish outrage to market his film was like something straight out of The Passion itself. “I wanted to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. I want to kill his dog.” Luckily for Gibson, from all reports Rich’s dog is one of those “turn the other cheek” sorts who is unlikely to accuse the director of speaking for Satan.
The relentlessly masochistic tone of Gibson’s film has caused some to ponder the director’s obsession with torture, as evidenced by the mandatory torture sequences contained in nearly every film in which Gibson has appeared. From being electrocuted in Lethal Weapon and drawn and quartered in Braveheart, Gibson even went so far as to insist on adding an unscripted toe-smashing scene to Brian Helgeland’s Payback. Though he was unsuccessful in similar attempts to add a testicular electrocution scene to the chickflick hit What Women Want, it was not for lack of trying.
Meanwhile, The Passion’s large opening box office is sure to inspire imitators, and early word that such knock-offs as The Passion of the Weekend at Bernie’s and Friday the 13th XI: Run, Jesus, Run are already in the works. Additional reports hint at an upcoming franchise of movies where Belgian marshal arts expert Jean-Claude Van Damme will beat the shit out of Jesus for two hours in various exotic locales. Whether the makers of those films will be able to pull off Gibson’s brass-balled bluster, claiming that critics of The Passion’s blitzkrieg of violence are merely deficient in character and unable to handle the power of his flawless cinema, may well depend on how closely they can duplicate that crazy look in his eyes.