At the New Republic

Beneath all the God-talk by Gibson is a commercial enterprise. Gibson’s film career has been anchored in glorification of violence (the Mad Max movies) and in preposterous overstatement of the actual occurrence of violence (the Lethal Weapon movies). Gibson knows the sad Hollywood lesson–for which audiences are ultimately to blame–that glorifying or exaggerating violence is a path to ticket sales. So Gibson decides to make a movie about Jesus, and what one thing differentiates his movie from the many previous films of the same story? Exaggerated glorification of violence.

Numerous other devout depictions of the Jesus story–including the 1979 movie simply called Jesus, which, as recently reported by Easterblogg’s colleague Franklin Foer, numbers among the most-watched films of all time owing to its showing in churches–downplay the flogging of Jesus and focus instead on his suffering on the cross. That is to say, numerous other devout depictions of the Jesus story take the same approach as taken by the four Gospel writers. Gibson instead decided to emphasize and glorify the story’s violence. Hollywood has indoctrinated audiences to expect to see violence glorified and exaggerated: Gibson now gives audiences a Jesus story in which the violence, not the spiritual message, is the centerpiece. This is a deeply cynical exercise, and one that results in money in Gibson’s pocket.