The Passion (2016)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

How sad is this?

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Didn't like the way this was done. Started here, went there. Now someone's singing, why I don't understand. Tyler Perry talks, let's introduce the characters - that's good because I had no clue who they were by looking at them. Now there's Mary in a TIGHT royal blue dress with a bit of cleavage. I guess we're really going to take the Passion story in a different direction. Whether I am or am not a prude is not my concern here. Mary wouldn't have been caught dead in a dress that showed her body - modernized version or not. The audience and flashing to Orleans auditorium was distracting. Why do I have to write 10 lines? This is a ridiculous rule. I just wanted to say that this production was not worth my time to try to watch and was way off what I think the Bible would have portrayed as the story of Jesus in modern days.

I love Jesus Christ so much I gave it a look and as always with an open mind. It was refreshing to see the venue was outside & live. It was also great to hear the opening choice of song with Yolanda Adams......and then this great selection of songs that was so fitting of the situations in each act. It was as if this was the only time a musical (w/the right choice of songs) could ever be produced. I found myself smiling as w/o noticing I was singing along. I mean, keeping in mind I do not like musicals, yet I was feelin' it.I think others would go into this production thinking of the so many Jesus stories to maybe ruin it for them, as well as forget that it's a modern take on the old play "The Passion". I am still playing it over & over again because I love listening to it. I makes me relax thinking of joy while taking back to a peaceful memory of when I was 1st introduced to loving Jesus. That's why I took a peak in the 1st place.....and I'm happy enough that I did.

This was so different than I expected! It was more like being in church :) This rendition of the final days of Jesus's ministry was very biblical in all of the words spoken. The songs were excellent and I got chills watching the ending of this modern adaptation. It WAS just that, an adaptation, not the full story so all have to keep this in mind. Anyway, giving it a 9 as I could have used more acting instead of the procession conversations although the interviews were great. Loved seeing Yolanda and Michael W. in this also as they are oldies but goodies! Daughtry, Seal and Trisha AND Jencarlos all did an excellent job!

Last night's "feature" was a preposterous program on the Fox network called "The Passion," which was billed as a dramatization of the life of Jesus — or at least the last week or so of it — but turned into a show I can only call "God-awful." The show opened in a big outdoor stadium in New Orleans, where the entire thing took place, and the big ballyhoo was that it was being performed live. The gimmick — well, there were several gimmicks, but one of them was that the main stadium would be the setting for the orchestra, the chorus and Trisha Yearwood, who played Mary. Jesus and his disciples would be seen in various urban locales making their way to the main venue; they arrived in town for Palm Sunday on a New Orleans trolley and Judas announced his intention to betray Jesus on a weird construction of various pipes — I wondered if they had picked this site because it would be a picturesque venue for him to hang himself from later, but they didn't go that far.While the cast was moving around the city, in other news a giant white cross was being carried to the main site by a group of volunteers — they were holding it like a coffin instead of dragging it the way the traditional (and wrong) depictions of the Crucifixion have depicted it (the real way a crucifixion was done was the victim carried the top bar of the cross and then it was attached to a permanent stake in the ground — Franco Zeffirelli, in his 1970's TV-movie "Jesus of Nazareth," is the only director I can recall who got it right) — and newscasters were following the procession and asking various parties in it how they felt about being there. What's more, the writer/director, Peter Barsocchini, came up with a script that only gave five of the principals — Jesus (Jencarlos Canela), Peter (Prince Royce), Judas (Chris Daughtry), Pilate (Seal) and Mary (Trisha Yearwood) — featured roles. Christ's other 10 apostles became what Anna Russell would have called "a homogenous chorus — as in milk," basically reduced to following him around and so undifferentiated in Barsocchini's script they're not even listed by name on the show's IMDb.com page — just as "Disciple." Even worse was the lame-brained decision to follow Baz Luhrmann's example in the 2001 film "Moulin Rouge!" and, instead of commissioning a new score (or using an existing pop-rock setting of the Passion Play like Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar" or Stephen Schwartz's "Godspell"), to shoehorn in existing pop-rock songs that didn't even begin to fit in to the story. The host — what in Johann Sebastian Bach's time would have been called "The Evangelist" — was Tyler "Madea" Perry, whose continued popularity with the so-called "faith" audience is pretty inexplicable (though give them points for making a Black drag queen into a superstar!), and he was personable but had, like everyone else who actually got a line or more, to recite Barsocchini's awful faith-based dialogue.The one redeeming (to use a word with religious connotations!) grace of this production was Trisha Yearwood, who isn't exactly one of the most intensely emotional singers of all time but whose cool professionalism soared above the rest of the cast even despite the risible choices of songs for her to sing (she was supposed to be mourning the impending crucifixion of her son and the song they gave her to do that with was the old Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpiece of bathos, "You'll Never Walk Alone" and the horrible dress she was wearing, a blue thing with a slash across the top of it to reveal the tops of her breasts: an odd costume indeed for someone who was supposed to be playing the Virgin Mother of God. The show's silliest moments were the duet for Jesus and Judas when Jesus learns Judas has just betrayed him (and before he's arrested by helmeted riot police and makes his next appearance in an orange prison jumpsuit — I guess on this show orange was the new Jewish) and the later one for Jesus and Pilate (to quote another Anna Russell line, "I'm not making this up, you know!") to Tina Turner's big song from "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome," "We Don't Need Another Hero." (As long as they were using that song, couldn't they have got Tina out of retirement and had her play Mary Magdalene?)Otherwise "The Passion" was an excessively silly show with a score of such stupefying banality it made Andrew Lloyd Webber sound like Bach by comparison, and limp performances of these bad songs by everyone in the cast aside from Yearwood (I used to really like Seal, but here he sank to the level of his duet partner). I remember the hissy-fit my mom had when she and I watched the trailer for the film of "Jesus Christ Superstar" and she said, "Oh, no, they didn't make Judas Black" — this time, at least, Judas was white and it was Pilate who was Black! It also didn't help that Jencarlos Canela (supposedly a star of telenovelas in Mexico) as Jesus and Prince Royce as Peter looked quite a lot alike — the only visible difference is Peter had more facial hair — or that they were both such mediocre performers they became oppressive screen presences even though they're quite attractive young men who should have been fun at least to look at, if not to hear! Supposedly this sort of setting of "The Passion" has become a regular feature on Dutch TV, where it's been aired regularly since its debut in 2011 — but as far as I'm concerned the Dutch can keep it. And as for Peter Barsocchini: forgive him, Lord, for he knows not what he does!