You know the way Dracula likes to deliver a dramatic speech, then turns into a bat, and flies away? It turns out that the angel Gabriel does something similar, only he turns into a blue scarf, the same kind of snazzy number you might get in Monsoon as a birthday present for your mum. Whoosh! Away he goes. Unfortunately, Gabriel-as-knitwear is about as entertaining as it gets in this fairly straightforward biblical adaptation of the early years of Mary, mother of Christ.
Actually that’s not quite fair. Anthony Hopkins as Herod understands the assignment, bellowing lines such as “KNEEEEEEEL!” with requisite gusto. We’ve seen him serve more fully flavoured ham before, however, in lavish tosh like The Silence of the Lambs sequels Hannibal and Red Dragon; this is more ham-lite, the sort of villainy Hopkins can deliver in his sleep. Not that it’s not pleasurable to watch, but his Herod could have used at least twice as much screen time as he gets.
The titular Mary (Noa Cohen) is a bit of a drag, prone to pieties such as “I find pleasure every day in the mysteries of the Lord.” Fair enough, she’s the future mother of God. But when she tells a man who has just been brutally blinded by Herod that “vision comes in many forms”, you can see how people end up so virulently anti-religion. A very late stage swerve into Marvel heroine vernacular – “You may think you know my story. Trust me, you don’t” – doesn’t help matters either. It does, however, come right after the film’s best sequence, in which the infant Christ is saved from the swords of Herod’s minions as Bethlehem burns and our heroes get the hell out of the raging inferno on a horse. There is also a good bit where Mary is urged to stick baby Jesus in a wicker basket and lob him off a roof.
Alas, you have to sit through a lot of turgid Bible studies dramatisations of bits of scripture to get to the good stuff. All in all, last year’s Journey to Bethlehem, a musical covering the same material with Antonio Banderas as Herod, represents more bang for your biblical buck.
• Mary is on Netflix from 6 December.
