Son of God

When we first meet the hero of Son of God, a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment, he's approaching a fisherman with a classic boiler-room pitch: "Just give me an hour, and I will give you a whole new life," Jesus (Diogo Morgado) promises Peter, this messiah's self-amused look and extra dimples suggesting the face of different J.C.: Jim Carrey. We never really hear the rest of what Jesus says to Peter, which is a shame. That 60-minute presentation would be a gift in comparison to this kid-traumatizing 138-minute nails-in-the-hands storybook, a movie that could have been called The Greatest Story Ever Told Again and Again. Instead, the producers have opted for Son of God, which has a badass Man of Steel kick to it. Rest assured, this heavens-to-Earth transplant doesn't resort to snapping the neck of Judas in the final reel. Instead, Son of God goes all in with the cheek-turning, the warmly defiant pacifism, the ministering to the wretched, the forgiveness of even the most detestable, evinced in this case by the nastiest piece of work there is according to this movie's cosmology: tax collectors, who get more screentime than lepers. Son of God is a narrative shambles, more thudding than thunderous, always feeling like a sprawling TV miniseries cut up to fit into theatrical running time. That's no surprise, considering this is a distillation of The Bible, the basic-cable event from 2013. At the opening we see flashbacks, with voiceover, to the stories of Noah, Moses, and Abraham -- surely the first time the New Testament has kicked off with a "previously on . . ."