The film by Mel Gibson is moving because of its central contention, namely that an innocent man of high moral purpose was tortured and killed. It happens that the man in question, Jesus of Nazareth, is an object of worship, and that harm done unto him, in the perspective of those (myself included) who regard him as divine, is especially keen because it is not only inhuman, it is blasphemous.
But suppose that a similar travail had been filmed centered upon not a Nazarene carpenter who taught the duty of love for others, but, say, an attempted regicide. In 1757, Robert-Francois Damiens set out to assassinate Louis XV. The failed assassin was apprehended, and the king quickly restored from his minor wound. The court resolved to make an enduring public record of what awaits attempted regicides, to which end were gathered together in Paris the half-dozen most renowned torturers of Europe, who in the presence of many spectators, including Casanova, managed to keep Damiens alive for six hours of pain so artfully inflicted, before he was finally drawn and quartered. What kind of an audience could Mel Gibson get for a depiction of the last hours of Robert-Francois Damiens?
The film depends, then, on the objectification of the victim as Jesus of Nazareth; but even then, the story it tells is a gross elaboration of what the Bible yields.
Consider Matthew: "And when (Pilate) had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified. ... Then they spat on him and took the reed and struck him on the head." Luke: "I will therefore chastise him and release him" -- Luke records that the soldiers "mocked" him. And John: "So then Pilate took Jesus and scourged him. ... "And they (the soldiers) struck him with their hands."
What Gibson gives us in his "The Passion of the Christ" is the most prolonged human torture ever seen on the screen. It is without reason, and by no means necessarily derivative from the grand hypothesis that, after all, the crucifixion was without reason, as Pontius Pilate kept on observing. One sees for dozens of minutes soldiers apparently determined to flog to death the man the irresolute procurator had consented merely to "chastise." There are records of British mariners who were literally flogged to death, receiving 400 strokes of the cat-o'-nine-tails delivered on separate vessels, lest any sailor in the fleet be deprived of the informative exercise.