Passion Play

By Passion Play I'm not referring to the dramatic presentation depicting the suffering of Jesus of Nazareth, rather I'm referring to the 2010 movie starring Mickey Rourke, Megan Fox, Rhys Ifans and Bill Murray. I recorded the movie a couple of weeks back because the description sounded interesting in a peculiar way, and got around to watching it last night. Here's the summary of the movie from Amazon:
The last thing washed-up jazz musician Nate Pool (Mickey Rourke) wanted to do was betray sinister gangster Happy Shannon (Bill Murray). But it may be the last thing he does unless he can deliver Lily (Megan Fox), a beautiful and mysterious carnival sideshow attraction. The stakes can't get any higher for the two lovers as they try to elude the merciless killer who will stop at nothing to keep Lily for himself. Kelly Lynch and Rhys Ifans costar in this gritty and unpredictable tale of redemption in the hard-boiled tradition of classic film noir.
Believe me, that description is not on target.  This movie sucks so bad that it boggles the mind. On Rotten Tomatoes the movie has an approval rating of 3% and yes, that's out of 100!  According to the writeup on Wiki, the movie is a vanity project of Mitch Glazer who wrote and directed the movie and cast his wife, Kelly Lynch, as one of the leads. The reported cost was $15 million and the movie theater net was $3,669. Yikes! The movie was introduced to the world at the Toronto International Film Festival and according to the article on Wiki some of the comments from critics there were:
Variety describing it as "Perversely eccentric and frequently inert." In a video review, David Poland extended his condolences to Glazer for his 20-year dedication in realizing the project, but described the experience as "an absolute car wreck." eFilmCritic's Erik Childress left the screening after an hour and declared it "Awful." Karina Longworth from Village Voice asserted that "it's hard to imagine that anyone will take Passion Play nearly as seriously as it takes itself."
I can't argue with those comments. This was one very bad movie. And here's a SPOILER, so don't read on if you have some weird masochistic need to watch this movie, the lead guy is dead---the entire movie was a dying dream of his. Ta-duh! You're tortured for an hour and a half and then you find out it never happened anyway. Geeze. To put the final nail in the coffin, the best acting performance was that of Megan Fox---and I think everyone knows how talented she is. Rourke was an embarrassment, Murray was just there for a paycheck, and Lynch is married to the writer/director.

Heed my warning and avoid Passion Play.

Comments

kenju said…
There's no doubt in my mind that I will heed your warning.
Hey you! How's it going stranger! I thought I'd pop by and say hi, since I haven't been by your site in a while.

I hope everything is going well! I see you haven't been blogging lately.

Drop by and say hi sometime!

Cheers,
Tanya
Unknown said…
I love bad movies, but your warning is enough to keep even me away from this one... 3/100 on Rotten Tomatoes? Wow...

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