The nativity story

Catherine Hardwicke seemed like the perfect wildcard for a biblical adaptation. The thought of the dreadlocked hippy from Texas (responsible for Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown) at the helm of a film about the birth of Christ was promising.

But instead of delivering a gritty remix of the familiar story, we're given the high-budget equivalent to a local high-school production. The Nativity Story is faithful but uninspired-an immaculately conceived retelling that shies away from both controversy and innovation.

The cast is composed of relative unknowns with the talented Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider) in the lead as Mary. Castle-Hughes radiates an aura of innocent religiosity, but her ability is limited by the sparseness of dialogue and the seeming absence of any real conflict in the film.

The 100-mile-plus journey to Bethlehem is composed of a few scenes of moderate suffering culminating in Joseph's sort of painful looking sandals. King Herod is benignly malicious, the mass execution of infants in Bethlehem is tied up in a couple shots. And the crucifixions of suspected Messiahs are so far removed from the brutality of The Passion of the Christ that the film has a PG rating, a classification The Lion King barely made.

But where The Passion of the Christ provoked audiences by means of its viciously authentic sequences, Story will be forgotten in its bland pleasantries. It's as if Mary and Joseph picked out one of the most sanitary barns in Bethlehem. Although the climactic shot of the natal scene is aesthetically beautiful with manger and Magi bathed in silver starlight, it is a portrait more than a reality.

The Nativity Story strives for the epic. But an epic film is more than sweeping shots and CGI-it's a fulfillment of audacious thought and storytelling which unfortunately, Hardwicke fails to accomplish.