Alexander Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)November 25th, 2004
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We also don't recommend Oliver Stone's Alexander. At least to anyone who doesn't have three hours to kill, as well as a desire to be bored to death-slash-watch the frightening tragedy collectively called Val Kilmer's Career. Kilmer isn't the star of Alexander, but he's in it enough to have some of the magical Wonderland/Spartan/Batman Forever/The Island of Dr. Moreau stuff rub off on the final product. You can smell it from where you are, can't you?
Instead, we get Colin Farrell (A Home at the End of the World) as The Star, namely, a blonde bisexual who, coincidentally, shares the same name as this awful film. He has mommy issues (presumably because Angelina Jolie sounds like Natasha Fatale), and like most of the women I've dated, he has daddy issues, too. Then Alexander starts conquering land like nobody's business, amassing an empire that rivaled even Wal-Mart by the time he was 32. Then he dies. Of course, like any standard year-end biopic, the death is shown at the beginning, with everything else following a jumbled but fairly standard flashback timeline (except the really disjointed death scene of Daddy Kilmer).
Aside from some brutal (but, sadly, in short supply) battle scenes, which are perhaps the most inventive since Braveheart and the only thing remotely reminiscent of Stone's previous work, Alexander represents everything that's wrong with the big, bloated Hollywood pseudo-epic. Too much with the lavish and not enough connecting with viewers, just like fellow DOA members The Alamo and Troy, which all look like the exact same gay masquerade party to me (only in this case, it really is a gay masquerade party - red states beware!).
I honestly tuned out less than 15 minutes into Alexander, thanks to an extraordinarily lengthy opening credits sequence (which doesn't actually involve any, you know, opening credits) and the excruciatingly dull narration from Anthony Hopkins. It gave me major high school flashbacks, hurtling me back in time, into history classes which required careful attention to shapely female classmates in order to stay conscious (as nice as Rosario Dawson's full frontal scene was, it wasn't enough of a distraction for a three hour lesson). Now if I can just make it back to my locker without having my books knocked out of my hands, I'll be okay.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
