Oliver Stone Manages to Make Colin Farrell Unsexy

Rating: Null/10 (1 December 2004)

"Alexander" will be remembered is as the only movie that managed to make Colin Farrell, let alone Jared Leto and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, seem unsexy.
No it's not because they are playing gay men (and they aren't bi-sexual -- Alexander only gets it up for a woman with a knife at his throat when he realizes he needs an heir). While the script makes several jabs at the film "Troy" for portraying the Achilles/Patroclus relationship as familial rather than as lovers, at least that mess luxuriated in the male figure homo-erotically; this may be the only sword-and-sandals epic where almost the only part of hunky male anatomies we see are eyes and flowing hair. Russell Crowe was plenty sexy in "Gladiator" with virtually no romantic scenes.
The actor playing the young Alexander does look extraordinarily like Farrell, but the untying of the Gordian Knot is not presented as terribly exciting.
Oliver Stone films are usually distinctive for their in-your-face editing, but only two battle scenes enliven the long story. And those mimic Christopher Doyle's color coded cinematography in "Hero (Ying xiong)," as first one is covered in desert sand and the second in a forest of blood (and I did keep wondering how elephants were fitting between the trees in an Ewok-like terrain).
Women, as usual in any Stone film, get short shrift but they are used more confusingly than his other work. Poor Rosario Dawson has to endure a naked scene that's violently animalistic before she turns into a nag - how can she whine about returning to Babylon when she's never been there?
The casting of Angelina Jolie as Alexander's mother made some sense in the early scenes of his childhood, but the decision not to age her twenty years is just annoying. We are perfectly capable of realizing their Oedipal relationship without having them appear as their actual comparable ages to make it creepier, let alone constantly surrounding her with snakes as some sort of inappropriate reference to Eve.
Her Transylvanian accent just sounds silly, even if it fits into the geographical premise, though the occasional maps don't really help amidst the confused use of both ancient and contemporary geographical terms. I suppose it's a comment on the history of talking film that has portrayed Ancient Greeks as high class Brits that the Macedonians here all speak with variants of Farrell's Irish accent to indicate that they are usurpers.
I was looking forward to the long movie finally ending with Alexander's death but no we had to suddenly endure what seemed like a half-hour flashback that was supposed to add mysterious motivations to the anti-climactic death scene and could just as easily have been put in chronological order.