From my piece at CINE-FILE:

A work in which a single point is driven into the skulls of the audience again and again and again. But viewed as cultural artifact instead of as cinema, the movie is slightly more interesting. Devoid of all nuance, Gibson’s feature-length torture opus offers an unusually blunt peek at the S & M fascination of a particular dogmatic religious sect. That the movie is embraced and patronized by so many millions of mainstream Christians is proof enough that such a micro-articulated film, coming along at exactly the right moment, is paradoxically capable of meaning whatever its audience wants it to mean. Think of THE DARK NIGHT, which was interpreted differently by right-wing conservatives and liberals, or Garbo’s final gaze in QUEEN CHRISTINA. THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST can be both a sincere expression of faith and a bloody mess. That is its true, unwitting genius.