Entertainment

Passion Play

‘Passion Play” is an uneasy mix — a sort of David Lynch noir — but you can do worse than a movie that features Megan Fox stripped down to her tattoos and Bill Murray as a pinstriped gangster who says things like, “Kill him and bring her back here.”

A gimlet-eyed Mickey Rourke gives the movie a center as a trumpet player who wanders a broken landscape of killers and circus freaks. At a sideshow, he meets a caged beauty (Fox) who wears a pair of angel’s wings, though she explains she’s more of a bird-woman.

The horn player and the ladybird stumble into a relationship as they discuss what to do about her wings. Naturally, he contacts a murderous pimp (Murray, styled to look like a mob version of Barry Goldwater in horn-rimmed glasses) and offers the thug a chance to exploit her for paying audiences.

Even when scary, Murray is somehow funny, too, and he steals the show as always. But Fox is surprisingly tender and ethereal, and though the movie is both too strange to take seriously and not weird enough to live up to Lynch’s macabre surrealism, you have to credit writer-director Mitch Glazer (co-author of “Scrooged”) for being daring.