Well, it was dumbed down, in a way, since it put so much into depicting torture of various kinds but gave very little time to developing Jesus as a person or even showing what his message was.
The violence didn't bother me in the least. And that's what bothered me about the film. I didn't feel sympathy for Jesus during all this. I felt sympathy for Mary, for his disciples, and for other characters, but I felt like Jesus in this movie was fairly undefined. It's a flaw in the script, IMO, not a flaw in the source material (which wasn't written for entertainment).
