PASSION PLAY (eOne, 2010) D: Mitch Glazer, w/ Mickey Rourke, Bill Murray. Rating: N DVD package: none Rating: N
For my taste, Passion Play has too few WTF moments to qualify, but some of you may wish to enshrine it in the anti-masterpiece honour roll beside Showgirls and Plan Nine From Outer Space. It certainly has the right stuff: a ludicrous story, heavy-handed straining for significance, bad acting and dialogue, a laugh-out-loud surprise ending you’ll see coming from a mile away and, best of all, the more you think about it, the less sense it makes.
Mickey Rourke plays a burnt-out trumpeter who dodges a gangster’s bullet and finds a winged woman (Megan Fox) in a carnival in the middle of nowhere. They flee together, but the über-pimp (Bill Murray) who wants the trumpeter dead now wants the girl.
Rourke milks the role for all its bathos, but the character is too vile for sympathy. Worse, he’s decades too old for Fox and seriously flabby, which adds major ick to their sex scene. In a comedy, Murray’s prissy pimp would be mildly amusing. Here it’s just baffling.
What were they thinking? Without any bonus material, we’ll never know.
EXTRAS Widescreen. English audio. English, Spanish subtitles
