"Nefarious"

 Saw the movie last night.

It's intense, as you may have heard.  It's also designed to be red meat for hard-boiled Christians, using Latin, Hebrew, and Greek as marks of 'authenticity'; to my sensibilities, the language-stuff was cheesy pandering to a Bible-belting crowd; it wasn't really necessary, but that's a matter of taste; it did its job. 

There's a nasty little swipe at Roman Catholics when a priest appears, but you'd expect that from a movie clearly made by evangelicals, and in reality, some Roman Catholics likely approved of the scene.  (It would have been far better if the priest was identified as a Jesuit, for reasons known to actual Catholics.)

Nonetheless, the movie makes its point very well, thus "intense."  The principal actor developed his character extremely well; the secondary character was also well-played, but his part was a little more 'stock character.'  The prison warden deserves plaudits, as do all the other minor characters who played their parts very well.

It was unfortunate that the last 10 minutes or so were very weak.  Perhaps that was due to the (cheesy, again) appearance of Glenn Beck, which added nothing to the plot that could not have been done much better with a different character conversing with the psychiatrist, e.g., his girlfriend, or another psychiatric professional, or even his next-door neighbor.  Sort of like the 'languages' thing, having Beck appear makes the inverse case for 'less is more'.

All told?  Worth seeing as a stark and powerful reminder of the existence and activities of powers and principalities which we tend to forget or deliberately push to the back of the mind while worrying about inflation, celebrity twits, or politics; you know, 'important stuff.'

But it's not Gibson's "Passion."