I watched Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ on DVD; I wanted to see if it was as bad as I'd heard. I played it at 8x normal speed, so I could pick up its essence and avoid the boring dialog.
At any rate, even though the actor playing Jesus looks alright (see Ugly Jesus Test), the movie itself is ugly, with a sadistic palette. And the movie goes nowhere: Jesus gets flogged and beaten until they nail him to the cross. That's it.
Along the way, the Jewish religious types look squeamish and guilty; Pontius Pilate looks reasonable and sad, a colonial technocrat forced to carry out this torture-fest; all the women are the image of suffering when they're not mopping up blood -- it seems like 20% of the movie is of Mary's face, soaking up Jesus' pain like a beautiful sponge.
Mel is proud to be an old-school right-wing Catholic; everyone has their place, and anyone who disagrees can burn in hell.
Beyond that, the apparent message is: unlike the million other torturings inflicted across human history, Jesus' meant something. (For one thing, it meant Mel could torture him in a movie and make millions.) I hate to think what happened to Mel in his formative years, and I hate the way he promotes such a brutally shallow vision of life.
I made a little video from samples of the movie, but didn't like its looks (or the fact that it, like its source, went nowhere but through the whip). I might use some in another video, but will have to tint it so it doesn't poison the rest.
Update: The tinted video is here.