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by Flick Chick Vique

The Nativity Story is gifted with 3 Red Vines for an earnest effort.

The good news is The Nativity Story is good family fare for the holiday season. The bad news is that this is probably the most dispassionate version of a bible tale that I have ever endured.

I understand the producers wanting to make a family friendly movie but I’ve seen lots of family movies with great heart and heart pounding action that are wonderfully magical. You won’t find any of that in The Nativity Story.

What you will find is an earnest effort to tell the story of the union of Mary and Joseph and the birth of Jesus. A cast of varied experience will hold a couple of familiar faces, though most will be new for audiences.

Ciaran Hinds as Kind Herod is one of those faces but in spite of his long list of credits, the only one that stood out for me was The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. ( I loved that movie!) Hinds does one of the better jobs as the King haunted by prophecies of a future ‘king of kings’.

Shohreh Aghdashloo will be recognizable as a terrorist from last season’s 24. Her performances as Elizabeth, along with Oscar Isaac’s as Joseph, are to be credited with infusing Nativity with the biggest emotional bangs. I expected nothing less from Aghdashloo, she’s a fantastic actress that never disappoints but Isaac was a real find.

I also found the Wise Men scenes to be some of the most creative and clever. Maybe that’s because they were more ‘wise guys’ than wise men!

Sadly, the girl who has the biggest credit beside her name gave one of the flattest performances. In 2004, Keisha Castle-Hughes became the youngest female ever to be nominated for Best Actress. But the magic she brought to Whale Rider is nowhere to be seen as Mary in The Nativity Story.

The whole cast has a great ethnic look which is refreshing. Although I found the ‘angel’ who appears to Mary and Joseph to be kinda creepy! He seemed a little more demonic than angelic! While I might be inclined to give director Catherine Hardwicke a break for working with mostly unknowns, I simply can’t in light of the dynamic performances Mel Gibson regularly gets from lesser and even more inexperienced casts.

In short, it’s not that The Nativity Story is bad, it’s that it’s not great. And the greatest story ever told deserves to be nothing less than great.

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