More Hollywood than Homer

Rating: Null/10 (17 May 2004)

I went to see "Troy" with an open mind. I was willing to accept Brad Pitt as Achilles, and I thought the casting of Orlando Bloom as the vain but ultimately ineffectual Paris a good choice. I was bolstered by the selection of Peter O'Toole (who is good at playing loonies) as Priam, and of Sean Bean (possibly the best supporting actor of his generation) as Odysseus.
The last three do not disappoint. Unfortunately, nearly everything else about "Troy" does: Homer's epic of a ten-year war is twisted so that the events of "The Iliad" appear to have happened within a week. Eric Bana, as the noble and ultimately doomed Hector, is never given a chance to rise above leaden dialogue before he's crushed by Pitt's garbled Achilles, although there are some genuinely touching scenes between him and Andromache (Saffron Burrows).
The greatest disappointment about "Troy" is that it weighs down truly exciting, sword-swinging action with thoroughly dull dialogue and predictable sequences. If the audience heard one more variation on "This is a fight for the ages, and the names of us fighting it will be remembered forever" or saw one more sequence in which some hero who had died valiantly was put to the torch by one of his warrior comrades, it would have been two too many.
Finally (and I know this will get me flamed from here to Homer's Styx), Brad Pitt looks awfully nice as Achilles, but he can't carry off a line. When he's not required to be showing off his personal-trainer-honed physique, he's delivering his admittedly more-wooden-than-the-Trojan-Horse dialogue in such a manner that the first half is unintelligble due to its speed and the latter half insufferably slow. "What did you say, and would you get to the point?" sums it up.
In short, by the time Troy finishes burning two and a half hours after the film starts, it's not a moment too soon. This could have been a fantastic epic had its adapters given their source the kind of attention Peter Jackson and company gave "The Lord of the Rings". They chose not to- and Troy suffers for it.