Sure, an' 'tis Alexandre, King o' de Grakes

Rating: 6/10 (12 July 2006)

This film got such awful reviews I skipped the theatrical release, but after reading IMDb reviews that suggested it's an overlooked classic I decided to give it a try.
The good: It's an Oliver Stone, and has some fascinating ideas and glorious moments of spectacle.
The bad: It's a weirdly pc-ized version of the young conqueror and the story is a rambling muddle, full of unintentionally funny moments. Stone hasn't successfully plotted a film about the charisma and tactics of a brilliant but often ruthless visionary, undermined by selfish politics. And those accents!!!
Alexander (Farrell) is conceptualized as a multiculturalist questing to unify a world of tyranny and petty politics. Mom Olympias (Angelina) is an embittered victim of Al's lustful dad Philip (Kilmer), taking her vengeance politically. This might work if this was the saga of Phil and Oly, but a major focus is the dynastic/ethnic politics swirling around Al, so vengeful Oly - and her... Greek?... accent - just kind of confuses things.
Stone's handling of the love and loyalty of men is also a major fumble, confused by the gay angle and lacking necessary buddy-ing between Al and Hephaestion (Jared Leto). Instead we get dumbth like Al soliliquizing when he should be riding to the rescue of Parmenion or grandly speechifying, to swelling background music, that his veterans should be embarrassed to go home and leave him - then going ballistic, executing the critics, and rolling on. And there are unintentionally funny moments, like Old Ptolemy (Hopkins) sententiously declaring that Alexander has captured the imagination of the world - by taking two more wives (and after the honeymoon scene with Rosario Dawson, Wife One, that really DOES capture the imagination!!!) and the hilarious scene of Al ignoring the death spasms of sick Hephaestion during a monologue on urban planning!?! The multiple accents, particularly Angelina's cross between Garbo and Elvira, are just frosting on the bundt cake.
Anyone who thinks this is a subtle nod to Greek tragedy has confused Euripides with Ray Harryhausen. There is no chorus of self-interested shouters in Antigone, and anyway this is not really a parable of tragic inevitabilities or overweaning ambition; it's the opposite! In fact it would have been a better film if it had been straight-forwardly the tale of a young filmmaker bucking the studios and conquering greater artistic territory while jealous subordinates try to stab him in the back...