Too Much Talk - Not Enough Action

Rating: Null/10 (16 November 2004)

I saw Alexander at a screening last night and it's perfectly awful. There's a historic war and costume epic somewhere smothered under dense declarative text where the actor reads and reads till your eyeballs dry out. A less-is-more attitude in the cutting room would have made this a better filmic experience. Stone planned, shot and edited the great battle sequences crisply, and they are convincing, authentic in feeling and appropriately gory and violent. Other good things: costumes, sets, photography, sweeping scenery, Vangelis music, reliably seamy-faced Brit character actors. But an excess of stagey speechifying dominates the drama. A good cutter would also hack gratuitous folk dancing, Felliniesque orgies, and the endlessly lingering, smoldering, longing gazes by Alexander's pretty boyfriends. OK, boyfriends. Move on. Casting: Colin Farrell is a fun guy but he's no fun at all here. He doesn't have the voice, the physical or psychic presence to command in this epic role. They also couldn't get him a decent peroxide job, and dark roots are a constant distraction. Val Kilmer: lousy role, latexy makeup, costume-shop wig, puffy, too young. He has bad lines and uses them. Angelina Jolie: has the looks to fill Sophia Loren's pouty-lipped, cat-eyed sword-and- sandal position, but instead plays a domineering uber-Jewish mother to Alexander  she would have to be pregnant at 8 to have borne him. Poor Rosario Dawson throws herself physically into her role as Alex's wife, taking this as a serious-actor career boost, and she's gorgeous and pitiable. Her scenes with Farrell are about the best other than the battles  but you know you're going to end up with Angelina soon enough, chewing the paint off the scenery, or gratuitous flying-eagle symbolism, or Anthony Hopkins blathering his way through a history-lesson narration in a tiny garden jammed full of 'Greek-style!' statues that you might find at your local Armstrong Garden Center (I kept looking over Hopkins's shoulder for a St. Francis of Assisi).