The Young Messiah is based on Anne Rice’s 2005 novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It begins in Alexandria, where seven-year-old Jesus (Adam Greaves-Neal) is having trouble fitting in with the other children. He is wrongly accused of causing the death of another child and is made out to be some kind of demon when he somehow manages to revive him. His parents (Sara Lazarro and Vincent Walsh) decide that they must now return to Nazareth. The family makes the perilous journey, along the way trying to figure out what to do about the child’s divinity.
There is fertile narrative ground in exploring these lost years of the young Messiah’s life, but this film doesn’t dare to make any of it interesting. It doesn’t really imagine anything particularly compelling happening during these years, the movie mainly composed of tension-free scenes that have the characters trudging towards the conclusion that we are all already familiar with. This film really makes the case for why these years aren’t covered in scripture: there isn’t really a lot to talk about.
This is a really dull story. It doesn’t even have any real conflict. A good number of scenes are devoted to Mary and Joseph struggling over how to talk to Jesus about his divine parentage. They debate over whether it would be better to just keep the child in the dark in order to keep him safe. This argument is pretty baffling, because right from the start, Jesus already seems to know that he is special. At no point does any of this argument actually affect the child Jesus. He just kind of does what he does, and his parents can’t really do anything about it.
The movie offers audiences little to hold on to. There isn’t any tension to drive the film through its nearly two-hour runtime. There is a mysterious figure that only Jesus can see that seems to represent the devil, but at no point does this figure actually seem like a threat. A roman centurion (Sean Bean) is pursuing the family, but the arc of this character is telegraphed so early on that it is rendered moot. Through it all, the film seems to ignore Jesus. It almost seems afraid to give the Messiah a human personality. It doesn’t want to risk making him anything less than the perfect, beatific savior that he will eventually become.
And in so doing, the movie offers no new insight into the Messiah story. The film is basically a reaffirmation that Jesus was always Jesus. The movie is mainly an uneventful trip back to Israel, another dusty costume drama completely lacking in incident. The production is nothing to get excited about, either, the movie unable to hide its cracks at crucial moments. And the cast is equally as boring. Adam Greaves-Neal presents a Jesus that doesn’t really seem bothered by anything. Sean Bean looks completely bored as the soldier Severus. Sara Lazarro and Vincent Walsh bear the full brunt of the movie’s aversion to meaningful conflict.
The Young Messiah fails to capitalize on a potentially captivating material. Jesus as both man and God is an inherently interesting character. A story of the Messiah not fully formed should be filled with conflict, and a trip from Egypt to Israel ought to be fraught with peril. And yet none of that happens. The film never fully embraces the possibilities of this fiction, the potential presented by all these years uncovered in scripture. It instead completely justifies the omission through a complete lack of imagination.
My Rating:
