Passion Play is a film with high aspirations but woeful execution. It is a ridiculously heavy handed film that is far more pretentious than the material deserves. In many ways it reminds me of the sort of rubbish Mickey Rourke was forced to star in before his career revival post-The Wrestler. Of course he has a history of picking bad films but why the likes of Bill Murray would also be attracted to this material is beyond me. The whole film lays it on thick with the metaphors yet doesn’t do anything interesting with them. Instead it is an inert and flat story that plods along seemingly devoid of any drive whatsoever. None of the cast seem remotely bothered and the direction is equally as laborious. The cinematography is the only positive (hardly surprising given Christopher Doyle’s involvement) and even then it is undermined by some pretty shoddy green screen work. It also has to have one of the worst, but unintentionally amusing, endings to a film I’ve seen in a long time.