"Son of God" is a Chintzy Melodrama About the Horrors of Capital Punishment
Alternate headline: "Son of God" is a Chintzy Melodrama About the Horrors of Killing a White Longhaired Guy With a British Accent, Because That's Totally Who Jesus Was, So Stop Saying That
"Son of God" is a Chintzy Melodrama About the Horrors of Capital Punishment
By Alan Scherstuhl
The Village Voice
When we first meet the hero of Son of God, a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment, he’s approaching a fisherman with a classic boiler-room pitch: "Just give me an hour, and I will give you a whole new life," Jesus (Diogo Morgado) promises Peter (Darwin Shaw), this messiah’s self-amused look and extra dimples suggesting the face of different J.C.: Jim Carrey. Often, working a miracle, he looks as pleased as a professional magician dazzling with a trick.
Peter agrees to hear him out and is rewarded with a holy fish bounty. We never really hear the rest of what Jesus says to him, which is a shame. That 60-minute presentation would be a gift in comparison to this kid-traumatizing 138-minute nails-in-the-hands storybook, a movie that should maybe have been called The Greatest Story Ever Told Again and Again, Sometimes with Blood by the Bucket and Sometimes with Fabric Characters on a Cheery Felt Board. Instead the producers have opted for Son of God, which has a badass Man of Steel kick to it. Rest assured, this heavens-to-Earth transplant doesn’t resort to snapping the neck of Judas in the final reel.
Instead, Son of God goes all in with the cheek-turning, the warmly defiant pacifism, the ministering to the wretched, the forgiveness of even the most detestable, evinced in this case by the nastiest piece of work there is according to this movie’s cosmology — tax collectors. Taxes get more screentime here than lepers, and the filmmakers present them as the age’s great evil, although they don’t quite claim Jesus agrees. When he’s pressed on the subject of whether the Jews of Jerusalem should shell out their shekels to Rome, Jesus replies with the exceedingly subtle "render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s" bit. This sets an anti-tax mob cheering, as if they’ve been vindicated. The movie — which otherwise underlines and Christ-splains everything, like a nervous Sunday school teacher — leaves it to you to figure out what exactly that much-debated edict is supposed to mean.
(snip)
In form, this haphazard assemblage of scenes actually suggests the one-thing-after-another looseness of the Gospels. There are concessions to Hollywood storytelling: the introduction early on of Pilate (Greg Hicks) as a villain whose ass would be stomped by any other movie hero; shock-cut flash-forwards to bloody Jesus yowling in pain; tension-juicing sequences of stabbings and combat training; hilarious expositional dialogue like, "He has a big following in Galilee"; the way Jesus’s promise that "I am coming soon" at the ending (spoiler!) sounds like the threat of a sequel.
The rest: http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-02-26/film/son-of-god-movie-review/
Flashback: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x818212
