Overall Rating
 Awesome: 9.66%
Worth A Look: 4.55%
Average: 5.68%
Pretty Bad: 39.77%
Total Crap: 40.34%
10 reviews, 116 user ratings
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| Alexander |
by Loey Lockerby
"Oliver Stone forgets everything he ever knew about filmmaking."
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Let’s make one thing clear right off the bat: I have no patience with the homophobic morons who are upset that Oliver Stone has decided to portray Alexander the Great as a “fag.” Like many men in ancient Greece, Alexander is known to have had relationships with both men and women. In that culture, it was no big deal. Grow up and get over it. Besides, even if Alexander were a super-manly heterosexual, this movie would still be a piece of crap.It’s not surprising that Stone’s film is pretentious and intellectually shaky – all his movies are. The real shocker is how poorly constructed it is. Stone is usually a master of pacing, editing, and getting career-best performances from his actors. His filmmaking skills are nearly always enough to compensate for lapses into melodrama and heavy-handed chest-thumping. “Alexander” is a jaw-dropping exception, a sword-and-sandal epic by way of Ed Wood.
First of all, there’s the casting. Colin Farrell is a very good actor, but he lacks the kind of heft and charisma that a man who conquered whole continents needs. Forget the Irish brogue and bad dye job – this Alexander is a petulant neurotic whose motivations are as disjointed as Stone’s edited-in-a-blender narrative. Throughout the film, people talk about what a brilliant, complex figure Alexander is supposed to be. Too bad we never see these qualities in action.
Angelina Jolie (another fine performer making bad career choices) hams it up as Olympias, Alexander’s freak of a mother, whose pronouncements about her son’s greatness are turned into camp gold by Jolie’s inexplicable Natasha Fatale accent. As if trying to balance out her scenery-chewing, Val Kilmer plays Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedonia, with an ambling shrug. Way to pick up a paycheck, dude.
Bad acting isn’t enough to ruin a movie, so Stone makes sure to include plenty of other cinema-killers. There’s the ponderous voice-over narration by an aged Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), which conveniently tells us about all kinds of interesting events that Stone can’t be bothered to actually show. There are battle scenes that play like “Saving Private Ryan” on speed, until they slow down long enough to give the audience a good look at a horse-vs.-elephant showdown that ranks among the funniest screen images of 2004.
And, yeah, there’s the gay thing, although it isn’t nearly as daring or provocative as the controversy makes it sound. There are lots of longing glances and tentative hugs between Alexander and his reputed lover, Hephaistion (Jared Leto), but it’s all so coy, it turns into more of a running joke than anything else. And it’s hardly groundbreaking, given that there’s a full-on nude sex scene between Alexander and his wife, Roxane (Rosario Dawson). Actually, this is more of a rape scene, with the two of them hissing and growling for no apparent reason as he forces himself on her. Like Olympias, Roxane is an emasculating lunatic, which plays up both Stone’s rampant sexism and his devotion to a clichéd Oedipal subtext.
Everything about this movie is so over-the-top awful, it would be a cheese classic if it weren’t so damn long. Even the pretty (yet obvious) matte paintings start to look silly after a while, and you could construct a drinking game around any number of Stone’s follies.“Alexander” goes on forever, though, becoming a grueling cinematic ordeal that loses whatever appeal it might have had less than halfway through. After three hours, nothing is funny anymore.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11182&reviewer=380
originally posted: 12/01/04 03:43:15
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USA
24-Nov-2004 (R)
DVD: 27-Feb-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
20-Jan-2005
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