Passion Play

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Movie Details

• Genre: Drama, Suspense/Thriller
• Release Date: 2011-05-06 NY/LA
• Running Time: 91 min.
• Director: Mitch Glazer
• Cast: Megan Fox, Bill Murray, Mickey Rourke, Rhys Ifans, Kelly Lynch, Rory Cochrane, Bud Cort, Chris Browning, Liezl Carstens, Lora Martinez-Cunningham
• Writer: Mitch Glazer
• Distributor: Image Entertainment

Mickey Rourke recently made headlines for dubbing Passion Play "a terrible movie," a proclamation that's ultimately most notable for its understatement. Teeming with second-rate neo-noirisms, Mitch Glazer's film follows once-famous jazz trumpeter Nate (Rourke), who after mysteriously avoiding execution for screwing the wife of gangster Happy (Bill Murray), stumbles upon a remote desert carnival. There, he falls in love with melancholy winged angel Lily (Megan Fox), whom the devilish Happy soon also covets, and who just can't avoid being displayed in a glass booth for leering paying customers. Glazer paces his dreamlike material with a slow-motion-addled torpor that's aggravated by his apparent desire to exhaust the world's supply of downbeat piano music. Rourke and Murray gamely, if futilely, strive for archetypal cool, while a pouty Fox is as unconvincing as the special effects for her angelic appendages. The writer/director seems to think he's remaking Point Blank as a sensual ode to divine love, but narrative inertia and unintentional comedy — like Nate seducing a woman with a goofy lemon-under-a-napkin trick, only to discover that she's a dope-pushing demon with Christ and the Virgin Mary tattooed on her respective ass cheeks — condemn his saga to the realm of hellishly pretentious misfire.