Alexander the Not-so-Great

Rating: Null/10 (25 November 2004)

I won't continue to belabor the overall inanity of the film, but the central issue to the failure of this film was the miscast primary character. I am a huge Colin Farrell fan, and I think he's been brilliant in some of his roles, but this simply isn't one of them.
The best contrast I can think of is Richard Burton in "Anne of the Thousand Days." Henry VIII is a similarly mythical and larger-than-life character, and it's difficult to picture Henry VIII in any way BUT as Burton, so well did he capture that character. Yet Burton himself was unable to captivate audiences as Alexander in the earlier film made about his life, and Farrell has fallen so short that I'm afraid his career may never recover.
Forget the megalomania and homoerotica. It's absolutely possible to have a flawed central character who is still charismatic, engaging, and sympathetic to the audience (think Gibson as William Wallace, Costner as DA Jim Garrison ... heck, Stone even managed to make Harrelson and Lewis almost likable in a sick way in Natural Born Killers). Stone very convincingly covered the flaws in Alexander's character as he saw them. What he forgot was to put in a few strengths that might make us give a rip what eventually happened to this man. Farrell's Alexander simply makes you wish fervently that one of his many depicted enemies would get on with it and just do him in.
In Braveheart, the English were unequivocally the "bad guys" and whether you agree with that in reality or not, within the movie there was no doubt who you wanted to win each battle. Same in Gladiator. Same in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, King Arthur, and many other moderately to insanely successful films which have included battle sequences. Here, you never start to care about Alexander personally, or about his battles globally, so you don't know who to root for in the battles and eventually side somewhat furtively with whoever he happens to be attempting to conquer. Who and what are Macedonians? Most people with a standard high-school history education would have trouble answering that question. And after seeing this film, the only answer would be, "a bunch of drunk, bisexual, whiny traitors." Go, Persians.
The difficulty in portraying a character like Alexander is similar, in my mind, to the difficulty in portraying a character like Julius Caesar or Cleopatra (or, for more modern interpretation, a Ghandi or a Roosevelt or a Monroe or a Kennedy). In order to make it work, the actor has to be able to capture the indescribable, magnetic quality that made the icon a person who drew people, sucked them in, made them believe fully and wholly that impossible dreams could be realized. People like that only come along a few times a century in reality, and they're usually busy or dead. Therefore you have a rather limited selection of normal actor-type people who are really nice to look at, but do not have that magnetic quality; and they're almost always going to fall short in trying to capture the uncapturable. I honestly can't think who, amongst the Hollywood selection at the present time, WOULD be captivating in a global role like this one.
The saddest thing about this film to me is that somehow Stone took one of the greatest heroes, armies and stories in the history of mankind, made an extremely expensive and long examination, and managed to have not one single heroic character in the film.