Reviews are pouring in for The Young Messiah, the latest faith-based film to hit the silver screen, but it’s not getting nearly the same accolades as the much more dramatic Risen earned from both critics and audiences.
According to William Avitt, writing for The Blaze, the movie is based on a novel entitled, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, written by occult-fiction author Anne Rice during a brief period in her life when she returned to the Catholicism of her youth (she has since left the faith entirely).
The book, and the film, documents mostly the 7th year of Jesus’ life. It consists of a variety of incidents in the life of the young Messiah (played by Adam Greaves-Neal) who heals, prophecies, and resurrects animals and people alongside his parents Mary (Sara Lazzaro) and Joseph (Vincent Walsh).
Typical of the film’s fare, the opening scene in the movie features Jesus being bullied by an Egyptian child. Nearby, a strange blond man with a brown goatee, obviously a Satan-figure, finishes eating an apple, then tosses it to the ground. The bully trips on the apple and dies from injuries sustained in the fall.
The village rises up against Jesus for killing the boy even though he obviously had nothing to do with it. The mob pounds on the door of the family home demanding that Jesus be turned over for stoning. Another child convinces Jesus to do for the dead boy “what you did for the bird” – meaning bringing it back to life. Jesus does so and brings the dead child back to life, thus averting disaster.
After this ordeal, Mary and Joseph decide it’s time to return to Judea. In an effort to be at least somewhat biblical, it is revealed that Joseph has been visited in a dream by an angel who announces the death of Herod and informs him that it’s safe to return home to Nazareth.
“The events chronicled in this film are entirely fictional,” Avitt writes. “They are not based on anything in the Bible – apart from Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt after Jesus’ birth and staying there until Herod’s death . . . This is a novelty piece, and nothing more.”
Avitt also complains about inconsistencies in the plot, such as how Joseph and Mary are depicted as knowing who Jesus really is, and yet appear confused when the 12 year-old child who was found in the Temple tells His parents that they should know He must be about His Father’s business.
Other reviewers don’t give the film much higher grades. Variety’s Nick Shager refers to the movie as a “pious drama”, calling it “a work of minimal imagination and even less subtlety.”
Shager is not impressed with much about the film, especially the blond apple-chomping demon (Rory Keenan) who he describes as a “1990’s-era Brad Pitt.”
Bruce C. Steele of Citizen-Times calls the child actor portraying Jesus “an adorable vacancy, speaking his lines passably but with no sense of inner struggle and not a lot of convincing emotion of any kind.”
He summarizes: “What an audience expects from a movie called The Young Messiah is some intelligent speculation about how a small child grasps such a huge destiny, but director Cyrus Nowrasteh, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, has little to offer. Besides Mary's and Joseph's fretting [about when to tell Jesus about His divinity], the film avoids its own world-changing context, instead limping along thin plot paths about an attempt to find and kill the boy, an escaped slave and Jesus' often ill-timed miracles.”
His concluding recommendation? “For your Easter movie this year, stick to Risen.”
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