So Mel Gibson has been persecuted all the way to the bank. The Passion of the Christ--undertaken by him as a work of faith, and promoted to the faithful as if he, too, were about to be killed by unbelievers--is a box-office smash, to which I have contributed my own $10.25. Yes, I have now watched the movie (a day after deadline pressure and an absence of press screenings forced me to write about it unseen, for our March 15 issue), and I have found it to be worse than expected.

It's worse, first of all, as filmmaking. From the opening scene of Jesus's agony in the garden, with its silent-movie head-tossing and chest-heaving, its slithering snake (evil is afoot!) and $2.98 clump of trees backlit in a dry-ice fog, Gibson directs down to the audience, as if presuming us to be bumpkins used to a diet of corn.

When Gibson wants to impress us with the decadence of Herod's court, he whips up a scene that poor, saintly Jack Smith might have titled "Sodomite Fleshpots of the Orient" (only Smith would have done it better and wouldn't have been serious). When Gibson wants to illustrate maternal love, he shows Mary running in slo-mo through the bosky light of a flashback, hurrying to comfort a toddler Jesus who has scraped his knee. (This greeting-card image pops into her head when her adult son, flayed raw, tumbles beneath the massive beams of the cross--a conjunction of events that proves the flashback to be not just trivial but superfluous. Doesn't Mary have enough on her mind already?) And when Gibson wants you to understand that certain characters are evil, he makes sure they're double ugly. In fact everything has to be doubled before Gibson will trust you to get the message. By my count, Jesus falls not three times but six on the way to Calvary. At the moment of his death, it's not enough for the veil in the Temple to be rent, as in the Bible; an earthquake has to rip a chasm right up to the altar.

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