The audience's desired response to this spectacle is not revulsion, but something like the cowering, quivering awe manifested by Mary (Maia Morgenstern), Mary Magdalen (Monica Bellucci) and a few sensitive Romans and Jerusalemites as they force themselves to watch. By the time the crown of thorns is pounded onto his head and the cross loaded onto his shoulders, he is all but unrecognisable, a mass of flayed and bloody flesh, barely able to stand, moaning and howling in pain. Once he is taken into custody, Jesus (Jim Caviezel) is cuffed and kicked and then, much more systematically, flogged, first with stiff canes and then with leather whips tipped with sharp stones and glass shards. His version of the Gospels is harrowingly violent the final hour of The Passion of the Christ essentially consists of a man being beaten, tortured and killed in graphic and lingering detail. Gibson has departed radically from the tone and spirit of earlier American movies about Jesus, which have tended to be palatable (if often extremely long) Sunday school homilies designed to soothe the audience rather than to terrify or inflame it. It is disheartening to see a film made with evident and abundant religious conviction that is at the same time so utterly lacking in grace. Gibson has constructed an unnerving and painful spectacle that is also, in the end, a depressing one. The Passion of the Christ is so relentlessly focussed on the savagery of Jesus' final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it. Given the Crucifixion story, Gibson did not need to change the ending. I thought of Homer more than once, with an involuntary irreverence conditioned by many years of devotion to The Simpsons, as Gibson presented his new movie, The Passion of the Christ, to carefully selected preview audiences across the land, making a few last-minute cuts, and then taking to the airwaves to promote and defend the film. The audience flees the theatre in disgust. Homer persuades Gibson to change the picture's ending, replacing James Stewart's populist tirade with an action sequence, a barrage of righteous gunfire that leaves the halls of Congress strewn with corpses. Smith Goes to Washington", enlists the help of Homer Simpson, who represents the public taste (or lack of it). THERE is a prophetic episode of The Simpsons in which the celebrity guest star Mel Gibson, directing and starring in a remake of "Mr. Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion of The Christ triggers a debate in the United States on the extreme violence it depicts and its portrayal of Jews.