Fast, furious ‘Ben Hur’ remake
Just enough action to keep one interested
(6) BEN-HUR. Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov. Starring: Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell, Rodrigo Santoro, Nazanin Boniadi, Ayelet Zurer, Morgan Freeman, Haluk Bilginer. Showing at: Hemingways, Boardwalk, Walmer Park, Baywest. Reviewed by: Robbie Collin. IN A face-to-face encounter with the incarnate Godhead, what kind of face should one pull? The Coen brothers offered a suggestion earlier this year in their thistly Hollywood satire Hail, Caesar!: when George Clooney’s matinee idol Baird Whitlock confronts Jesus Christ on the set of his new Biblical epic, the direction hissed at him from off-camera is, “squint against the grandeur”.
The faces Baird pulls are less suggestive of fear and trembling than a nasty astigmatism, which sums up the dilemma faced by any filmmaker trying to resurrect the long-dormant Biblical epic genre today – let alone with a story whose 1959 incarnation, directed by William Wyler and starring Charlton Heston, might be the best-known of the bunch.
How much grandeur do modern audiences really want to squint at?
For Timur Bekmambetov, the Kazakh-born director of Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the answer’s simple: plenty, providing it keeps things moving.
His spry and streamlined Ben-Hur comes kitted out with enough natty scythes and spikes to satisfy any circus-goer who’s only turned up for the crashes.
The iconic status of that climactic race as portrayed in the 1959 edition, itself is unimpeachable – and Bekmambetov’s so cripplingly aware of this – that his film begins on the starting line, with Jewish nobleman-turned-galley slave Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) and his adoptive Roman brother, Messala (Toby Kebbell), frowning manfully, reins wrapped around their hands, ready to gallop towards their maker.
From there we’re whisked into the past, where the two younger men are also racing horses – except here it’s for fun; an adrenal expression of their brotherly bond. (Judah and Messala’s fraternal bond – in the novel and previous film versions, they were just good friends – is one of a number of plot fine-tunings that work surprisingly well). Mother Naomi (Ayelet Zurer), sister Tirza (Sofia Black D’Elia) and love interest Esther (Nazanin Boniadi) are effectively no more than cogs in the machinery, while Morgan Freeman’s Sheik Ilderim is just Morgan Freeman’s Morgan Freeman again, in Jedi bathrobe and dreadlocks.
Jesus, who’s played by Rodrigo Santoro (300, Focus) as a kind of divinely handsome Galilee hipster: forget Vin de Table, he looks as if he could turn water into craft beer. Unlike Wyler’s version, we both see Christ’s face and hear his voice delivering faintly Yoda-esque homilies about compassion and hope to the downtrodden: again, it’s broad stuff, but connects with jolting force.