From once acclaimed but now increasingly derided director
Ridley Scott comes Exodus: Gods and Kings,
a cinematic re-telling of the Moses story. The latter is played by Christian
Bale with Joel Edgerton as Rameses, with Ben Kingsley as the lowly slave who
tells Moses of his true parentage and of the prophecy that foretold his
liberation of the Hebrews from Egyptian rule.
The prevailing problem that hangs like a shadow over the
entire production is the ethnicity of the leads. It’s rather hard to ignore the
fact that whilst everyone around them appears to have stepped out of ancient
Egypt, the assembled cast just don’t look the part, regardless of their acting
ability and liberal amounts of fake tan (not helped by the ever-slipping accents). While Bale is suitably intense and Aaron Paul works well as a rugged
and awe-struck Joshua, the other notable actors (Sigourney Weaver, John
Turturro and Ewen Bremner amongst others) just look like well-paid set
dressing.
The film is also camp as Christmas, opening with a
flamboyantly dressed Turturro as the screeching Pharaoh, only to become brasher
and shoutier from then on. However, the sheer scale of the film and the scope
of the spectacle mean the brazen acting fits rather well, though I could do
without the washed-out colour palette. But if you’re going to go bold, you have
to do it properly, and Scott has been rather daring in certain places: Moses
himself begins as a sceptic of the Gods (both Egyptian and Hebrew), and God
himself is depicted as a petulant child, playing a game with the lives of
humanity and throwing the pieces aside when frustrated.
The plague scenes are tremendously entertaining, a glorious
CGI-fest of locusts, rivers of blood and pestilent sores. Despite going on for
around twenty minutes, it’s actually one of the shorter set pieces. It’s almost
as if Scott feels that the Cleopatra-like
scale of the locations has to be matched by a gargantuan running time. Sure,
your head might be invested, but the collective bums of the audience have long
since given up. But even with over two hours to spare, the development of
Rameses and Moses prior to the titular Exodus
is almost non-existent, the viewer dropped into the story with the two as
adults. Prince of Egypt at least had
the brains to show the two as friends, before the rivalry began. Here, we
barely get a chance to learn who’s who before the fighting starts.
Exodus is another
film from Ridley Scott that makes you wonder what happened to the genius behind
Blade Runner, Gladiator, Alien, Thelma
& Louise, and wonder whether he’ll ever recover. It’s worth noting that
Scott has dedicated the film to his late brother Tony, but you can’t help
wishing he’d left that for a better production. Whatever else people might say
about Tony being the less talented of the two brothers, he never made a film as
terrible as The Counsellor.
★★☆☆☆
