MonsterHunter

Two-time Academy Award winner Anthony Quinn barely registers here in this movie about the dude everyone picked over Jesus to be set free when it was time for the weekly crucifixions. Quinn has very little dialogue, very few scenes of dramatic impact and spends most of his time on the road to accepting the Christian faith, grunting and mumbling like he just woke up or something.

This movie is yet another attempt to cash in on the popularity in the fifties and early sixties of the biblical epic. Unfortunately, there are only so many people from that time that you wouldn’t mind sitting through the five hours each of these things usually run (Barabbas is actually one of the shorter epics, running a measly 137 minutes). I understand a movie about Jesus. I understand a movie about Moses. I even understand a movie about a fella named Judah Ben-Hur, but Barabbas? What did this guy rate in the Bible? About one sentence?

Apparently Barabbas was a thief and murderer, but I never saw him do more than get wasted, try to hump women and burn Rome down. I guess he also killed a few guys, but that was olden times and people would run into your spear all the time. He was sentenced death and was to crucified the same day as Jesus. It turns out that there is some kind of tradition around that time of year in the Roman empire where the crowd gets to vote on one dude to be set free. I suppose that keeps people coming back to watch these things, otherwise the weekly crucifixions probably get a little old and lose their impact.

For some reason, the choice this year is between Jesus and Barabbas. Barabbas apparently had the more loud-mouthed friends because once survey time was over, the Romans freed him and went ahead and killed Jesus. The premise of the movie (I guess - I kind of checked out for the next ninety minutes until Barabbas won a scholarship to gladiator school) is that Barabbas has to go around in life with the weight of the fact that the Son of God died in his place. I suppose this then is a really long movie about survivor’s guilt and we all know how entertaining that is.

After he is set free, Barabbas tries to enjoy his new found lease on life the only way any of was would: drunken carousing with loose women! There is much drinking, dancing on tables and moves that only a player-hater could hate as Barabbas seeks to show everyone that getting Jesus killed isn’t about to slow him down. Of course, he manages to do all this partying at some honky tonk just down the street from the site of the crucifixion, so he periodically feels pangs of guilt and gets kind of down whenever Jesus walks by with his cross and whenever a solar eclipse rolls in to mark the crucifixion of Christ.

I think any criminal defense attorney would advise her clients that once you beat the rap on some murder and stealing beef that you need to leave town and keep a little bit of a low profile. Barabbas though is a man of the people and I suppose he wanted to show his supporters that their loud cheers for his freedom were appreciated.

Meanwhile, Barabbas has a girlfriend that has become a Jesus groupie while he was locked up in the hoosegow (huh, that’s a bit ironic - usually it’s the guy that’s locked up that finds Jesus) and is saying that Jesus is the real deal. She goes off and watches Jesus die, then hangs out near the cave where they put his body. Barabbas shows up near the cave and shows her new found faith little respect, but later is a bit put out when he checks back and finds that Jesus’ body is gone from the cave.

He goes to a hastily-arranged meeting with the apostles. Barabbas reads them the riot act and basically tries to steal the gimmick of the doubting Thomas though by this time I think that Thomas had be cured of his doubts. This is where they introduce Barabbas to a very special guest - Lazarus! Thanks for coming out, man! If memory serves (and most of this I get from the short-lived Robert Urich TV series The Lazarus Man), Lazarus can’t die or he does die and gets brought back to life or he slept for twenty years and got woke up by Babe the Blue Ox or something. He and Barabbas have a talk, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what they said or even what the point of it all was. Presumably, Lazarus was putting Jesus over to Barabbas, but Barabbas got bored and left. Next stop: the stoning of his ex-girlfriend!

The pagans in charge must have gotten sick and tired of Barabbas’ woman running her yap about how Zeus and Mars sucked, because they bust her and put her in the big stoning pit in the center of town. I guess this is a separate form of entertainment/capital punishment from the crucifixions that they carry out outside of town. Barabbas sees this go down and is probably a bit put out by it, but who can really tell since he wears the same crabby “old man scowl” perpetually throughout the film.

In any event, he ends up back with his homeboys and they rob some Roman lackies and Barabbas ends up chasing some old-time priests, all the while mumbling about how they were hypocrites or traitors or liberals or something. I assume that this is somehow related to the stoning of his little lady and that this is Barabbas’ clumsy way of protesting things. Not surprisingly, it gets his probation revoked and since he has been spared before, there is some kind of primitive double-jeopardy rule that he can’t be sentenced to death again, leading to this famous third-person lament from Quinn: “no death for Barabbas.” Quit your crying, you may have to live it, but I had to pay twenty-five bucks to watch it on a no-frills DVD.

Since he can’t be executed, they ship him off to that popular reality show of 45 A.D. called The Sulfur Pits. Here he endures a living hell of digging stuff that blinds lesser men and it is also here that he runs into a guy that is a big time Christian and becomes the closest thing Barabbas has to a friend. This means that Barabbas merely scowls and grunts while this guy talks instead of turning his back and walking away. You really wish that they would have traded Jesus for a guy with a bit more personality and it makes you wonder who these five or six dopes were that voted for Barabbas in the first place.

Since this is a historical epic, they realize that watching a dirty guy swinging a pick and whining about how hot it is, can only sustain a film for about 35-40 minutes and they start to steer things toward a more action-oriented last third of the movie. This is accomplished by having one of those big cave-ins that kills every living thing within a country mile of the mine, except Barabbas and maybe his friend (Barabbas had a buddy when he went on to gladiator school and I was never sure if it was the guy he dragged out of the mine.)

For no real good reason, once the pits blow up, Barabbas ends up at gladiator school. It’s a bit ridiculous since by this point Barabbas is almost 80 years old and you wonder why the Romans would be paying good money to see gladiator fights with washed-up, elderly criminals in them. That said, in spite of the patent silliness of it, the gladiator school part of the movie is by far the most entertaining. It is here that we finally get our promised appearances by Ernest Borgnine and Jack Palance.

Borgnine doesn’t have much of a role and his big scenes involved stuff like refilling Barabbas’ water glass and making snarky comments when Barabbas shows up for a secret meeting of Christians. Palance plays the part of the bad guy and does so chiefly through the use of very bad “evil guy laugh” and accompanying grin. He’s this stud gladiator that has won his freedom several times over, but has rejected it so that he can continue fighting. Of course, he gets to use a chariot and a net while his opponents stand helplessly around chucking a single spear in his direction.

The inevitable battle between this guy (I don’t remember his name, but whenever he showed up on screen to leer at people, I would shout “I am Drago!” at the top of my lungs for no good reason) and Barabbas lacks any kind of emotional punch and plays like a junior varsity version of the chariot racing scene in Ben-Hur. Drago even had slice and dice things on his chariot’s wheels! Barabbas proves to be too much for this guy and nails him with the spear causing him to take a long painful trip around the arena while his horses dragged the piss out of him. I think Barabbas kills him after this and gets his freedom.

Though, these scenes were probably the most exciting in the film, they were ultimately gratuitous, because we hardly had met the bad guy, he didn’t really have anything to do with Barabbas and I was unsure how this was helping Barabbas on his journey of faith. Drago did kill Barabbas’ buddy for being a Christian, but it wasn’t like it was personal or anything.

In Gladiator, Ridley Scott was smart enough to manipulate the audience with that really sissy Roman emperor doing all sorts of dastardly things to Russell Crowe and had him fight the emperor to the death at the end of the movie. Of course, that was about the silliest thing I had seen since that one time when they let an grump 80 year-old man into gladiator school, but at least you were given a reason to hate the emperor and wanted to see him die. He also was important enough in the grand scheme of things that it actually mattered whether he lived or died. Who cared if Drago bought the farm? He was just some no-name gladiator that had this thing for putting sweaty, scantily clad muscle men into nets.

Once free, he gets his buddy’s body and takes it to the catacombs where the Christians are having an apparently not-too-secret meeting. Barabbas is starting to come around and tells everyone that his pal would want to be laid to rest there. Some old (even older than Barabbas!) dude gets in his face and it turns out to be someone he met years ago and there is some talk, but I was asking Jesus to use his magic powers to make the DVD player hit the 137 minute mark so I had no idea what they said, but whatever it was caused Barabbas to go careening through the catacombs in search of some kind of direction from God.

About this time, Nero decides it would be a good idea to burn Rome down and Barabbas thinks that God wants him to destroy the pagan city so he sets a few fires (dude, they can do it just fine without your help), gets caught, and gets crucified. Up on the cross he finally finds his faith (funny, that’s when a lot people come around), croaks, and the movie mercifully ends.

The story of a guy getting all reformed, complete with tough times and good people dying all around him is an appealing one, but Anthony Quinn doesn’t give Barabbas anything that is appealing as a character. It’s not so much that he’s bad in the role, it just seems like the role is under written. We all know that Quinn was one of the great actors of his generation (his role in La Strada virtually defined the circus strongman!), but give him something to do other then mope around and mutter. There were scenes where he just stood off to the side while other actors did all the talking and when it was his turn to say something he would barely croak out something unintelligible before the scene ended or he was interrupted.

Barabbas just sort of meandered through everything that life dealt him, moaned about it periodically, then suddenly decided that becoming an arsonist was the new way and came around right before dying. If you haven’t seen the movie, trust me when I say that it isn’t just stupid sounding. I would complain about the fact that I thought Barabbas couldn’t die because of the whole Jesus-for-Barabbas swap early on, but that would have probably prolonged things another hour and a half and I don’t think any of us would want that. I guessed I could have saved myself all this time and trouble if I had known that the director also made Red Sonja.

© 2008 MonsterHunter