Movie review

We're doomed without Depp!

ALEXANDER: Oliver Stone's campy, overblown, badly acted, abominably executed (should we go on?) ego trip is one of the worst movies of the year.

[Warner Bros. photos] Colin Farrell plays Alexander with a mullet and little indication of what made the Macedonian king the great warrior and conqueror that he was.

After viewing Alexander, the first question is who's crazier: director, co-writer and megalomaniac Oliver Stone or the studio suits who keep on dishing out money for him to make movies? It's a close call.

For nearly three hours, Alexander displays a formerly great filmmaker carving a granite tombstone for his career. Stone announces his pretentions from the onset, with bombastic titles in English and Greek, while the first bars of a continually pushy musical score by Vangelis play. We're primed for something mountainous, having no idea how quickly Stone will step off the cliff, or how far he'll fall.

Where do we begin to explain what's wrong with this picture? Stone is making a movie about one of history's greatest warriors, yet he doesn't show any conflict until an hour has passed. Even then, viewers can't tell what's going on because tight closeups, frenetic editing and thick dust raised by horses make everything so unidentifiable. Portraying war as chaos is appropriate. Making the screen chaotic isn't.

Even more puzzling is that Stone doesn't spend much time on the battlefield, practically eliminating the reason sword-and-sandal movies exist. Then we should expect a character study to take the place of action, right? Forget it. Lengthy dialogues between Alexander's friends and foes simply confirm what Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) droned about in the History Channel-type introduction: Al is great, Al is good, let us thank him for reshaping the world. Amen.

Okay, so we can expect to learn what Alexander (Colin Farrell) brought to "barbarian" nations during his fourth century B.C. world tour, right? Wrong. Aside from a few snide remarks about the inferiority of non-Greeks and Alexander marrying a Persian (Rosario Dawson), Stone doesn't debate the appropriateness of invading and changing other cultures. That approach might have drawn interesting comparisons with modern politics. The only credit given to Greece's enemies is that they decorate beautifully and know how to handle monkeys and elephants. That's an odd oversight for a filmmaker previously so politically inspired.

So, Alexander must be a chance to dramatize Alexander's bisexuality and make a social statement for today's world, even if it's only more candor about homosexuality in the movies, right? Not even close. We get furtive glances among men, affectionate declarations between Alexander and his boy toy (Jared Leto) that would sound sillier only if delivered by heterosexual characters, and an orgy recalling Clay Shaw's costume party in JFK. Alexander is never shown having sex with a man, and he rarely kisses one, but he frequently makes puppy dog eyes at guys when he doesn't want to be lonely on the eve of battle. It's like watching Caligula trimmed for FCC standards.

What good is this movie? None, except for the Golden Raspberries factor that makes poor filmmaking enjoyable. Revel in the misplaced accents: Scottish for a Greek soldier, Irish for Alexander and Transylvanian for Angelina Jolie as the ruler's conniving mother. Shake your head at Stone's references to his other movies: crowd reaction to an assassination like he filmed on Dealey Plaza in JFK, a near-death scene filmed through garishly red filters and a hallucination of Jolie as Medusa that could be subtitled Natural Born Trojans. Or wonder at movie moments he rips off, such as Alexander on horseback rallying his troops with Braveheart bravado and a cry for freedom.

Or simply sit back and let the campy performances work their magic. Farrell's blond mullet hairdo is a start. His forced sensitivity and runt bravado don't exactly convey fearsome leadership. Some enterprising college student will devise a drinking game involving Jolie's constant fondling of snakes, or perhaps how many times Hopkins stares upward in wonderment. Count the number of characters who have an eyelid sewn shut, apparently a very popular battle scar.

One such prosthetic is worn by the film's most energetically bad performer, Val Kilmer as Alexander's father, King Philip of Macedonia. Kilmer roars through his role with latter-day Brandolike abandon: bloated, blustering and not caring much if anyone joins his personal rave. There's nothing subtle or thought-out about his performance, which makes him appear most at home in Stone's mess of a movie.

Grade: D

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Colin Farrell, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson

Screenplay: Oliver Stone, Christopher Kyle, Laeta Kalogridis

Rating: R; strong violence, sexual situations, nudity

Running time: 173 min.

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