PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 11/23/04)


If there's one thing Americans have learned from Donald Trump, it's that there's no correlation between world-crushing ambition and a decent haircut. So it should come as no surprise that more than two thousand years before the comb-over kingpin, the most powerful man in the western world was a nappy-haired mess.

Oliver Stone's Alexander is an astounding feat: After a career of epic biopics, the director of JFK, Nixon, and The Doors has managed to take one of the most fascinating men who ever lived and turn his life into a confusing, overlong, and patently unremarkable ordeal. An ambitious disaster, Alexander is the rare historical portrait that leaves you feeling as though you know less about its subject than you did upon entering the theater. What was it that drew Stone to his dream project? And where in this rambling 173-minute affair is that magic spark to be found?

In Nixon, Anthony Hopkins looked almost nothing like his historical counterpart, and yet audiences accepted him in the role, but it's impossible to consider Colin Farrell as our towheaded hero without questioning his starchy white skin, angry dark stubble, and peroxide-bleached mullet. There's a feral intensity behind Farrell's eyes that's right for the part, but the disguise leaves Alexander looking less like an invincible Greek man-god than an Irish boy who stumbled into an out-of-control toga party.

Among the other revelers at this bacchanalian free-for-all are Angelina Jolie as Alexander's mother, Olympia; Val Kilmer as his one-eyed stepfather, Philip; and Hopkins as the right-hand general, Ptolemy, who grows up to be the movie's gasbag narrator. Only Olympia emerges unscathed, a testament to Jolie's skill in juggling dour seriousness with full-blown camp. By treading the line, Jolie ensures that her performance will work no matter how the movie turns out. It's a smart move, considering that this lofty-intentioned saga ultimately plays more like the cinematic equivalent of a battle-scarred Abercrombie catalog. Jolie may never look a day older than her onscreen son, but she's a sultry minx, every bit as slippery as the serpents we see her canoodling with in every scene.

As it turns out, Olympia's love for snakes is perhaps the movie's most conventional relationship. Although Stone's screenplay acknowledges that Alexander maintained three controversial lovers — a male companion from childhood (Jared Leto), a beautiful Persian eunuch, and a wild Bactrian princess (Rosario Dawson) — the movie timidly avoids eroticism in all but the heterosexual coupling. The ferocious sex scene that results just might shake red-blooded audiences from their third-hour coma, but will they understand Stone's point that this crosscultural union is actually the most appalling to Alexander's peers?

Stone's obsession seems limited to capturing the touchstones of Alexander's life on film — the defeat of the Persian army, the taking of Babylon, and the spectacular elephant battle in Thailand are standouts to rival the old-Hollywood pageantry of Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, and David Lean — at the expense of understanding the human factors that motivated a man who conquered the entire known world and still felt driven to expand the boundaries of his empire. When Alexander's death arrives at the end of nearly three hours, the premature passing of history's greatest legend (he was 32) seems less a tragedy than a relief.

—Peter Debruge