The gulf between Moses movies can be measured in beards.
For “The Ten Commandments” (1956), Charlton Heston unrolled a splendid carpet of chin-hair; for the latest incarnation, Christian Bale offers realistic, scraggly whiskers that might belong to the third apostle from the right in any average biblical epic. “Exodus: Gods and Kings” prefers angst over showmanship, and the picture suffers accordingly.
Surely the film’s director, Ridley Scott, has been waiting all his life to get a crack at the florid yarn-spinning of the Old Testament. One of Scott’s most sheerly enjoyable movies, “Gladiator,” conjured up the sword-and-sandals mode of 1950s epics, and “Exodus” lays out an even bigger canvas: slave armies, plagues of frogs and locusts, the parting of the Red Sea.
It sounds like an ideal match for the man who made “Blade Runner,” but Scott’s grouchy approach falls short of the eager-beaver cornpone of Cecil B. DeMille (who vigorously mounted “The Ten Commandments” twice in his career).
Bale creates a somber Moses, adopted brother of Egyptian king Ramses (Joel Edgerton, from “The Great Gatsby”). You know the story: When an enslaved Hebrew elder (Ben Kingsley) informs Moses of his actual Jewish heritage, our hero goes through a spiritual crisis, is banished, and returns to wait out the plagues.
The storytelling has been sure-fire stuff for a millennium and a half, and it still plays. (In my Catholic childhood, I loved the plagues — so colorful and huge, plus they were numbered for easy categorization.)
Scott creates the big computer-generated vistas of pyramids and palaces, but the digital flatness diminishes the impact after a while. Both Bale and Edgerton seem on the way to interesting character detail, but there’s so much to cover they can’t complete the task.
And forget about developing the roles played by Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, Hiam Abbass, and other good actors; they barely register in the spectacle. Only Ben Mendelsohn (“Animal Kingdom”) gets anything memorable going, and he’s playing a caricature of pagan depravity (Scott’s tendency to equate villainy with insufficient masculinity is tiresomely in place here).
As for the parting of the Red Sea, the film uses a non-supernatural explanation for the event, and those optics score pretty well on the popcorn-movie scale. Scott also does something seriously haunting with the burning bush.
All that spectacle, yet “Exodus” violates the 11th commandment of Hollywood: Thou shalt not bore the audience. Mr. DeMille would not have let this happen.
“Exodus: Gods and Kings” (2 stars)
Director Ridley Scott takes on the biblical tale of Moses (Christian Bale), who splits from his royal brother Ramses (Joel Edgerton) and leads his people out of slavery. There’s some huge spectacle here (the Red Sea gets parted, etc.), but Scott’s grouchy approach and the computer-generated scale makes the movie too dull to really catch fire.
Rating: PG-13, for violence
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