The thing about cinematic literary adaptations is that someone will always think it's wrong. It's a personal matter taking literary characters and converting them to film, subject to one man or woman's direction. Mix in Mel Gibson and the American obsession with celebrity and the most iconic religious pin-up and you have one of the most controversial recent film releases, The Passion of the Christ.And I'm here to tell you it's not worth the hoopla. By conventional cinema review standards, I found the film disappointing, clichd and at times manipulative. The end is obscured by the means: obvious pains are taken to create an atmosphere of sympathy or guilt, but we are never given any context with which to gain deeper insight.

Instead, Gibson employs a transparent approach to something whose very nature requires deep introspection, thought and discussion.

Instead, Gibson appeals to the stomach, while telling us it is our heart. The music is overdone, the special effects are cheesy and the result is analogous to its intent. The relentless violence is gut wrenching and at times physically debilitating; we are so busy being disturbed and nauseated that Gibson effectively de-contextualizes the entire event, a dangerous liberty to take with the texts of organized religions. It is part second-rate horror film-with depictions of the Devil, effeminized and digitally enhanced, or manifested as a baby that seemed like a straight rip-off of the Trainspotting heroin-withdrawal baby-and part History Channel. Like a bad re-enactment, the temple cracks in an almost perfect zig-zag down the middle and slow motion is so over-used it really does feel like torture. It's at this point the film seems dumbed-down and repetitive; it fails to make any new insights while expanding on debatable elements of the bible.

Here's where my biblical knowledge ends and other reviews step in to help out. What I find most interesting about the film is that, as a vehicle for religious indoctrination, it is subject to the same criticisms of interpretation that most of religion is. I do think it's manipulative of Gibson to claim verisimilitude and yet the most upsetting and drawn out whipping scene (potentially the height of rising action) is only based off one or two sentences in the Gospels, meaning the proportion of textual basis to screen time has been completely disregarded (the longest sentence that mentions the whipping of Christ is in Matthew, where it says "He ordered Jesus to be first scourged and then handed over to be crucified.").

Along these same lines, Salon.com said it well in an interview with the Rev. Mark Stanger entitled "Inside Mel Gibson's Passion." Rev. Stanger is a canon precentor and associate pastor of San Francisco's premier mainstream Episcopalian church.

"The Gospels are pretty straightforward. They arrive at Golgotha, and then it says, 'Then they crucified him.' They just say it in a little short sentence," says the Reverand in his article. "They don't say, 'They yanked one of Jesus' shoulders out of the socket and they bounced the cross around face down after he was nailed to it.' This is all not to mention the fact that many believe the Gospels are never meant to be taken as eye-witness accounts in the first place."

The main controversy surrounding Gibson's film is the claim that it is anti-Semitic. In my opinion, the film skirts blatancy but on the whole chooses a fairly merciless portrayal of the Jewish High Priests. According to the Rev. Stanger, who attended one of the restricted screenings mostly for conservative Christians, "in the interview after the showing, Mel Gibson said the reason that he had [his cast] speaking those original languages-and I didn't misinterpret him, because he told a long story to illustrate it-he said, "If I was doing a film about very fierce, horrible, nasty Vikings coming to invade a town, and had them on their ship with their awful weapons, and they came pouring off the ship ready to slaughter-to have them speak English wouldn't be menacing enough." It's a hot issue; I think Gibson has made a fanatic's movie whose mainstream release launched itself off of his own celebrity.

In the end, I won't garner the film enough credit to change the American consciousness too much. An overdone drama is still an overdone drama even if it deals with God. In the end, it's just as modern and Hollywood as it can be: We would rather simplify, vilify, gore-ify and glorify our story than use it to stimulate thought and introspection.