Something tells me the religious epic Luther would be a very different beast had it been filmed this year instead of two years ago.
The writers, producer and director would have had Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ as a template.
If you're going to get people fired up about a historical figure, you need genuine passion.
Martin Luther is the 16th-century priest who became the spiritual leader of the Protestant Reformation.
He defied the all-powerful Catholic Church by posting his 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg,
Germany, setting in motion the first of numerous ideological breaks from Rome.
This Luther is not based on John Osborne's powerful 1961 stage drama, but rather on an original screenplay by Camille Thomasson and Bart Gavigan, who envision Luther (Joseph Fiennes) as a kind of spiritual version of William Wallace in another Gibson movie, Braveheart. He's taking on the Catholic Church and no one's going to stop him.
The film follows Luther from his conversion and ordination to his discovery of the corruption of the Catholic hierarchy of his time.
He watches the greedy Johann Tetzel (Alfred Molina) selling salvation and Pope Leo X (Uwe Ochsenknecht) enjoying the frivolity of a hunt.
But Fiennes never explodes into the kind of physical, spiritual and emotional fury Stacey Keach did with his shattering performance in the 1974 Luther biopic.
He makes his Luther far more internal, controlled and questioning.
He's also a bit of a wit in the film, such as when he explains there were so many relics of saints floating around Europe at the time, the saints would have had to have twice as many bones as regular humans.
In one of his last performances, Peter Ustinov adds some humour as Friedrich of Germany, the monarch who sanctioned Luther's revolt.
The production values are impressive. It was filmed on more than 100 sets.
Eric Till's direction is reverential, which makes Luther play out like a Masterpiece Theatre presentation.
To his credit, it's an effective history lesson, but not nearly riveting enough to be as entertaining as it is earnest.
(This film is rated PG)
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