Alexander

Review by Clint Morris

Like a flashy Cadillac with a newly finished exterior, but a disordered litter-adorned interior, Oliver Stone's Alexander is nice-looking, but as concave as a drainpipe inside.

Rarely does filmmaker Oliver Stone miss the mark, but in the case of the much-anticipated Alexander, he most certainly does.

He's done weaker films, like Natural Born Killers, for instance, which was a pain to watch, but it did have its merits - some of the casting, for instance, was inspired and the cinematography was a hoot.

Alexander, on the other hand, is the cinematic equivalent to a Halloween Pumpkin: From the outset it looks okay, but on closer inspection you'll notice it's been gutted inside.

The overworked Colin Farrell dies his dark hair blonde to play Alexander, a man whose motivation for conquering a vast empire, according to Stone and his two co-writers, was to escape the clutches of his manipulative mother (Angelina Jolie, who, in real-life is merely a year older than Farrell), not because he was an imperious megalomaniac.

To Stone's merit, Alexander's tale is overwhelming in range. There's so much ground to cover, and pragmatically, one just can't include enough in the film's feature time to paint a whole-enough delineation of the man.

To help piece together the moments in this, Stone brings in a narrator (Anthony Hopkins), which was probably wise, but ultimately takes something away from the audience's attachment to the main character.

Granted, if Stone had cast his movie better we might've still been able to form some sort of attachment to the lead characters – but he hasn't. Besides Farrell's reasonable take (but dude, the Irish accent just doesn't work!) on Blondie-boy Alex, Val Kilmer and Angelina Jolie, playing King Philip II of Macedonia and Queen Olympias, respectively, are dishonourably wrong for their parts. It doesn't help that they're delivering the kind of woefully wooden dialogue they're used to on General Hospital either.

Jolie is the biggest blunder – she's seemingly playing herself (surrounded by snakes at all times?) but with an unwelcome Russian accent. Puh-lease.

Obviously planned to be another star of the movie, in their own right, are the film's huge-scale battle scenes. There are many of them. Unfortunately, they're so ho-hum, and so defectively executed, that you can't tell who's who in the midst of battle, nor do you really care.

Imagine the feeling of loss Hollywood would have if its finest actors and actresses and one of its most prized directors had gone down in the Titanic. The same emotional abrasion applies with Alexander.

1 out of 5

Alexander
Australian release: Thursday January 20th
Cast: Colin Farrell, Val Kilmer, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto, Connor Paolo, Christopher Plummer.
Director: Oliver Stone.
Website: Click here.

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