Killing Jesus

Killg Jesus is for the most part a conventional retelling of the gospel narrative. But it displays great regard for the viewer's intelligence.

With an efficient and alternately clumsy and eloquent screenplay by Walon Green, Killing Jesus does not vary much from the Via Dolorosa. As a result, the lavish NatGeo treatment works a lot better than it did on the channel’s adaptations of O’Reilly’s earlier books, “Killing Lincoln” and “Killing Kennedy.”

While covering a good deal of ground, the filmmakers don’t linger over the ordeal of the Crucifixion in the way, say, Mel Gibson did in “The Passion of the Christ,” and the program benefits from that sense of economy. Still, the three-hour telecast (about three-quarters that length, sans commercials) must recover from a truly terrible opening.

There are a number of bad wigs and beards on display here, but much of the cast surmounts the costuming problems. The pace and the depth of the story might have been helped by extending this film into a two-night event.

It succeeds reasonably well in that goal, distilling the story of Jesus’ life into a tale of political and theological intrigue that could fit comfortably into a contemporary TV procedural.

As ham-fisted as the filmmaking is, the anticipated finale is gritty, convincing and moving. We feel the wrenching pain Jesus experiences on the cross. His final words are spoken like a man about to die after hours and hours of unimaginable agony, with resolution and perhaps a bit of relief. It isn’t enough to rescue the rest of the feeble effort, though.

Jesus hits a few of his main talking points (first stone, do unto others, turn cheek), but only a fraction and not the most subtle of them. And neither Sleiman nor the script nor director Christopher Menaul lifts the story off the ground.

The story has been adapted for screens large and small so often at this point that any new effort has to make clear why it needed to be made and what it’s bringing to the task that we haven’t seen before. This one never does.

Killing Jesus is a shallow telling of the Jesus story, with no more distinction than you might find in the generic reenactments of some historical documentary.

If more of Killing Jesus had unfolded from their perspectives [Romans and Jewish leaders], keeping Jesus remote and mysterious, it might have been more compelling. [23 Mar - 5 Apr 2015, p.15]