A Nearly Unwatchable Hollywood "Classic"

Rating: 2/10 (20 September 2006)

Hopeless.
If you can endure Charlton Heston's painful attempts at "serious" acting for nearly four(!) hours, you will ultimately be done in anyway by the film's sheer unwieldy clunkiness. It lumbers along under William Wyler's direction like a crippled elephant, coming alive in only a couple of places (the lauded chariot race scene, the sea battle sequence), only to ultimately collapse under its own self-important piety.
I'm sure the creators of this film thought they were doing their audiences all sorts of favors by dazzling them with gigantic sets and crowd scenes. But really, their efforts backfire, because they make it futile for the actors to try and compete with the film's sheer physical size. Who can give a compelling performance when he/she's never filmed in anything more than medium close up? Watching this film is like watching a stage production from the eighteenth row.
Movies like "Ben-Hur" are the reason why people roll their eyes at the thought of watching a biblical epic. I'm not religious, but it's not the religious subject matter that turns me off from this film -- it's the way it's presented, the way it's performed and virtually everything else about it.
Grade: D