I admit I wasn’t expecting much out of Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, but I at least expected some unintentional amusement. What I got instead was two-and-one-half-hours of half-baked, boring mess. This may, in fact, be the most boring movie I’ve seen all year. You know the biblical epic you’re watching is in trouble when you find yourself wishing that Edward G. Robinson would wander in from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 version of The Ten Commandments to liven up this biblical beached whale. (Face it, Eddie G. improbably saying things like, “Yeah, he’s been gone 40 days and 40 nights, see? He’s not comin’ back. We’ll build a golden calf, see?” would’ve been worth a lot of money in this lifeless lump.) Make no mistake, this isn’t the loopy visionary revisionism of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah from earlier this year. No, this is a confused dose of barely thought-out BS that plays more like a superhero origin story than anything else — complete with a surfeit of daddy issues.
Mr. Scott and his four credited screenwriters appear to have had it in mind to make the rationalist version of The Ten Commandments. As a concept, that doesn’t wring my withers, but then I’m not much of a believer. The problem is that they can’t figure out how to go about it. Take the plagues — please. They put forth quasi-explanations for water turning to blood, the infestation of frogs, the flies, the boils, etc. That some of these explanations are more far-fetched than the magical explanations is perhaps beside the point. That they can’t come up with a rational excuse for the death of the firstborn and just let it ride — right down to marking the Hebrew dwellings with lamb’s blood so that God gets it right — turns the whole revisionist idea into nonsense.
Other supposed “transgressions” like Moses only seeing God — in the form of Isaac Andrews as a kind of spoiled brat 11-year-old boy with a freshly-out-of-military-school buzz cut — after being struck on the head fare no better. OK, so Moses is delusional. Fine, but how is it that all the miracle biz happens if Moses is just a barking lunatic? Now, it has been questioned as to why this ersatz ancient Hebrew would see God as a Brit schoolboy, but we have it on the authority of Peter Cook in Bedazzled (1967) that God is English, and that’s good enough for me. At the same time, I do like the idea of Moses as God’s secretary, holed up in a cave chiseling out the Ten Commandments. (“Moses, take a tablet …” How do we know Moses was any more reliable as a secretary than Zeppo Marx in Animal Crackers?)
Of course, there’s the question of the movie’s racially incorrect casting. Well, it kind of makes this of a piece with the biblical pictures this apes, no matter how you feel about it. I understand Scott needing a box office name, and I buy that in terms of Christian Bale (even if his name is rather unfortunate), but seriously, Joel Edgerton as Ramses? At what point in what alternative history of the movies did Joel Edgerton become a box office draw? Did you ever say, “I’ve got to see that new Joel Edgerton picture?” Did anyone — apart from close relatives? Yul Brynner may not have been Egyptian, but he at least looked exotic. Edward G. Robinson might be the most ludicrous casting in The Ten Commandments, but he actually was Jewish.
None of this would really matter if the movie was good or even entertaining, but, no, it’s just plodding, dull and dumb. Oh, sure, the CGI-athon of special effects more or less works, but so what? They feel as rote and “just there” as the cardboard characters. Yeah, the parting of the Red Sea looked like a special effect when DeMille did it in 1956 and 1923, but it was at least special. There was a sense of true awe from a filmmaker who was at least a showman. All we have here are pixels. Maybe it’s just me, but those miracles more and more leave me feeling like the fellow in Oscar Wilde’s Salome — “I don’t believe in miracles; I’ve seen too many.” I certainly don’t believe in this movie. Rated PG-13 for violence including battle sequences and intense images.
I was excited to see this but with all the bad reviews its getting Im no longer sure.
Don’t let me stop you.
The main point of the Exodus legend or fable or whatever is God’s vengeance on the Egyptian’s via the plagues to force the Pharaoh to let them go. Trying to rationalize it all is only going to drive the believers away and make everyone else laugh at it. We are to believe that these plagues would be visited on Egypt by some cosmic chance after Moses gets knocked on the head? If anyone needed proof that boneheads make movies, this is it. I didn’t think that Christian Bale could out-grimace Charlton Heston anyhow.
Well, they’ve set themselves an impossible task that they can’t even figure out how to pull off. The one thing they do accomplish is to make God look worse than he does in the Bible. Bale — incredible as it may seem based on his other performances — just isn’t sufficiently wooden to challenge Heston.