Review

Exodus: Gods and Kings

150_t1_7020_v0137_left.1062 - A shocking hailstorm plagues Ramses (Joel Edgerton).
150_t1_7020_v0137_left.1062 - A shocking hailstorm plagues Ramses (Joel Edgerton).

Alfred Hitchcock once asked "What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?"

Good question. With Exodus: Gods and Kings, his fellow Englishman Sir Ridley Scott has managed to restore and even enhance the potential for tedium in the familiar Bible story. Imagine listening to a Sunday morning Scripture reading from a parishioner who has spent the previous evening pickling his liver. While the text the hungover reader is attempting to recite still has some power and inspiration, the tired, shaky voice makes the Word of God sound almost as stirring as the terms and conditions form on Facebook.

Exodus: Gods and Kings

71 Cast: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, Indira Varma, Maria Valverde, John Turturro, Emun Elliott, Golshifteh Farahani, Ben Mendelsohn, Tara Fitzgerald

Director: Ridley Scott

Rating: PG-13, for violence including battle sequences and intense images

Running time: 150 minutes

That's roughly the same emotional, intellectual and spiritual experience one has sitting through Scott's massive 3-D retelling of the Israelites' flight from Egypt. Scott, who's responsible for classics like Alien and Blade Runner and duds like The Counselor, has managed to remove anything potentially engaging from the Old Testament.

To be fair, Scott delivers plenty of CGI spectacle and delivers suitably catastrophic scenes of grasshopper feeding frenzies and bodies of water defying every known law of chemistry or physics. Scott even adds a few battle scenes just to make sure there are enough potentially awe-inspiring images to meet some quota Scott has in his head.

Despite the gargantuan eye candy buffet, Scott betrays his special effects crew by populating his backdrop with attractive mannequins instead of characters. Scott has assembled some terrific thespians, including Oscar-winners Christian Bale and Sir Ben Kingsley, but has apparently given them little guidance other than to "look serious."

As Moses, Bale gets into battles with Hittites, courts the lovely Sefora (Maria Valverde), witnesses plagues, confronts the obstinate Pharaoh Ramses II (Joel Edgerton) and even wakes from having slipped into quicksand (I'm not sure where that's in the Bible). Sadly, none of that registers emotionally or narratively. Scott curiously features Aaron Paul as Joshua, but asks him to do nothing but stand and stare at the sky.

Perhaps he and his peers were paid to avoid any sense of levity or humanity that might render their scenes interesting. Why Scott cast Sigourney Weaver and John Turturro to play thanklessly short and irrelevant roles where they deliver dull platitudes or simply look angry is probably something accountants for 20th Century Fox are asking themselves repeatedly as they look over the ledgers or watch the film.

Scott, working with a script credited to four different writers including Schindler's List adaptor Steven Zaillian, simply leaps from story point to story point without leaving any sort of impression. It's as if Scott were aching to get past the stilted dialogue and onto another computer generated miracle. The problem is that if the characters gazing at or participating in those wonders don't seem real, neither do the special effects.

Scott makes a couple of odd choices that aren't dramatically effective but at least relieve viewers from experiencing unwanted naps. For example, the screenwriters make Moses a skeptic before he becomes a prophet of Jewish emancipation. He even has moments of doubt. In the hands of more capable dramatists, this might have made Moses seem more relatable and his struggles more compelling. In Exodus: Gods and Kings it just gives Bale a few extra lines to memorize.

In order to get past the cliche of having a stentorian voice accompanying the burning bush (or maybe Morgan Freeman was occupied), Scott has a small but wizened boy delivering the Almighty's lines. Only Moses can see the lad, so the other characters look baffled as he converses with him. If you watch the spectators in the crowd during the film, their faces will look just as bewildered.

Cecil B. DeMille might have produced enough corn to feed Egypt for eternity with his 1956 epic The Ten Commandments (Edward G. Robinson and Anne Baxter act and speak as if they are playing New York gangsters instead of residents of ancient Memphis). At least, DeMille had an unerring instinct for how to move from opulent set piece to opulent set piece. His Moses story is just as politically incorrect, but at four hours, it seems shorter than Exodus: Gods and Kings.

MovieStyle on 12/12/2014

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