Unintentionally Hilarious; Stone must re-sit History

Rating: Null/10 (6 December 2004)

When I searched the internet for Oliver Stone's filmography, I came across a site that described him as "Hollywood's Most Exciting and Controversial Film Director". Whilst I would disagree, actually, on both points, at least you can see how someone might come to this conclusion: "U Turn" (1997), as I recall, was watchable drama not striving to re-write history or pretending to be anything other than cinema, and visually extremely stylish to boot; "Wall Street" (1987) was light-hearted fun done at a fast pace; "JFK" (1991) was, well, controversial; and "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989) was, I suppose, exciting and sort-of controversial. (I may have tuned out for the next installments of Vietnam until "Nixon" (1995), which contained such a ridiculous performance by Anthony Hopkins that I felt moved to leave the theater.)
In the Venn Diagram of Oliver Stone's films, however, "Alexander" would join (along with "Nixon") a circle labeled Unintentionally Hilarious, and also a larger, overlapping circle labeled Virtually Unwatchable (which would also contain "Natural Born Killers" (1994) and "Any Given Sunday" (1999)). Whilst Angelina Jolie speaks in what to me sounds like a modern Yugoslav accent, Colin Farrell and Val Kilmer use Irish accents (which would make sense uniquely for Farrell, assuming the actors had instructions to use their native accents). Kilmer, forced to act the drunken pig whilst declaiming dialog as wooden as anything ever improvised on the theme of Ancient Civilization, appears to belong to a different movie entirely. Eventually, the realization dawns that that movie does in fact exist: and that it is Stone's "The Doors" (1991). Other disturbing thoughts enter your mind as you watch "Alexander", among them, this: Farrell seems to have based his look at least in part on Jon Voight in "Midnight Cowboy". (Could this have been accidental, given Jolie's major contribution?) Ultimately, I was disappointed by the non-appearance Jim Garrison to explain the impossibility of an archer getting off shots accurately from elephant-back. Verdict: Oliver must re-sit History yet again.