Poor Oliver Stone. With Alexander, the film that was to be his career-topping opus, the director not only fails to make a great movie, he hasn’t even made a half-decent one. Alexander is perhaps the next Waterworld-much-hyped, incredibly costly, and downright bad.
Like some of Stone’s better work (e.g. Platoon, Natural Born Killers), the film is at its best when there is a threat of violence. However, Alexander’s tense scenes either erupt into the full-blown gore of warfare, or shift abruptly to Ptolemy’s dull, scholarly narration. Anthony Hopkins plays Ptolemy well, but his role is superfluous and distracting from the main action of the movie, and the framing device of his library 40 years later is unnecessary.
As for the bisexuality in the film, those hoping for steamy Colin Farrell/Jared Leto make-outs will be disappointed. The bisexual element is there, but it is done in a painfully self-conscious manner, and comes across as trite. Alexander and Hephaistion’s (Leto) declarations of undying love might be more believable if the two occasionally did more than give each other bear hugs with eyes streaming tears and smudged makeup. Creepily, there is more sexual tension between Alexander and his snake-charming mother Olympias (Angelina Jolie).
The film plods along with unnatural dialogue and wooden acting for nearly three hours. In that time, expect to see a parade of bad mullets, a distracting whirlwind of inappropriate accents, and inexplicable cinematographic choices, all rounded out by Vangelis’ score, which sounds like it came from one of those little stands at Shopper’s Drug Mart.
At the end of the film, Ptolemy tells his scribe who has recorded the story to “throw all that away-it’s an old fool’s rubbish.” Someone should have said that about the screenplay before $150 million was sunk into the project.-JENNIFER FABRO
