Not much passion to be found here.
The H-Bomb: Nate (Mickey Rourke), a down and out, sad sack musician, narrowly escapes a mob hit and wanders through the desert until he comes upon a circus populated by the typical assortment of freaks and weirdos. It’s there that he meets Lily (Megan Fox), a beautiful girl with wings… yes, actual wings that she was born with. Nate thinks she’s an angel, but Lily insists that she’s merely a “bird woman.” Nevertheless, Nate wants to take her away from her life as a freak show exhibit. And after a run-in with Sam (Rhys Ifans), the carnival barker who also happens to be Lily’s adoptive father, the two of them hit the road together.
In an effort to make amends with Happy (Bill Murray, doing his best impersonation of a somnambulist), the gangster who wants him dead, Nate offers to give him the bird girl in exchange for Happy sparing his life. After taking one look at her, Happy is enchanted and accepts. However, Nate has fallen in love with Lily, and she has developed feelings for him, and shit gets complicated… sort of. If you want to find out more, you’ll have to watch the movie. But, if you follow my advice, you will not only NOT watch this movie, you will stay as far away from this art house abortion as humanly fucking possible.
Now I’m gonna do my best to just get straight to the point and not take that much time with this one, because I’m already very angry at myself for wasting as much time as I did just watching it. Someone once said, when a mainstream film is bad, it’s usually just bad. But when an offbeat, indie film is bad, it can turn out to be an atrocious, unwatchable piece of shit, and that is very much the case with “Passion Play”. Notorious for flopping hard at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, this movie stinks worse than a cow pie rotting in the afternoon sun on a hot summer day. Not even the fuckin’ flies want to go near this thing!
This flick is “indie” in the absolute worst sense of the word. It’s weird for the sake of being weird. The characters are quirky yet shallow, unappealing, and completely uninteresting. I truly did not give a flying frog’s dick about anyone in here. It acts like it has something to say, yet says nothing at all. And, for the most part, it’s horribly paced and goes nowhere… slowly.
If I were to describe this flick to our esteemed editor Rick Swift, I would say it’s kind of like “Crazy Heart”, except the lead character is an even bigger loser, it’s far more absurdly pretentious, and it’s about a thousand times crappier than he remembers that movie being [Read Swift’s take on Crazy Heart, here]. It’s basically a love story between two lost outcasts who find each other. This most certainly is not a new concept, but it could have been done well, had writer/director Mitch Glazer (some big shot screenwriter, I‘m told) bothered to make either lead, or their story, even remotely interesting.
But he didn’t. I couldn’t have cared less if Nate lived or died. I gave not a shit if Lily ended up a permanent slave of Happy the gangster, and I really was entirely indifferent as to whether or not the two of them got together in the end. Even in instances that were meant to be magical or whimsical, like when the wind blows through Lily’s wings and she can fly for a moment, I was neither touched nor moved. I was just thinking, “Yeah, whatever, is this shit almost over? No? Goddamn it!”
Rourke’s been on a hot streak these last few years, but this time he left me cold. Looking as slovenly and ugly as ever, he tries his best to make us feel for Nate, but the character is just too damn dull to be either pathetic or sympathetic, no matter how often he gets on his knees and cries. Fox, on the other hand, provides some of the few bright spots in this otherwise dreary affair. It’s not just that she appears nude (albeit breasts covered), it’s that she actually gives the best performance in the film. I’m convinced she can be a competent actress, after all, and she gives Lily an innocent, child-like quality that almost made me care about her. As for Bill Murray… he showed up… he said his lines… and I’m convinced he was doped up on Valium the entire time. It’s not even worth mentioning that he makes for an even less intimidating gangster than Michael Keaton in “Johnny Dangerously”.
Okay, I’ve really devoted more words to this mound of diarrhea dung than I ever meant to, so I’ll wrap up. “Passion Play” is a love story with zero passion and a parable without a point. It’s a dismal cinematic train wreck that, unlike “The Room” or “Birdemic”, doesn’t even rise to the level of funny-bad, it’s just bad-bad (though there are some green screen shots that are so horrible they give “Birdemic” a run for its money). It is very bad-bad, and, as stated, pretentious as hell to boot. Do not even rent it out of morbid curiosity. Do not even take it if somebody tries to give it to you as a gift. For your own sake, give “Passion Play” a pass.
