'EXODUS' A DEAD SEE
Scott & Bale bring flood of problems
You have to work awfully hard to make a hash of the Moses story. Yet that’s what director Ridley Scott did with “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” the Biblical tale most memorably put on film in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 version, “The Ten Commandments.” On the face of it, the Moses story seems hard to ruin: The parting of the Red Sea, plagues, slaves yearning for freedom — it’s all there.
But this eye-rollingly bad movie is silly, sluggish, terribly written and miscast. That includes Christian Bale as Moses and Australian Joel Edgerton (as Ramses II), the sort-of siblings whose rivalry must power the plot.
The basics remain: Moses is a warrior of Egypt charging into battle next to Ramses, who’s the son of the pharaoh Seti (John Turturro). The ruler finds Moses more trustworthy than his own flesh and blood, but upon Seti’s death, only Ramses can be pharaoh.
A sneaky viceroy (Ben Mendelsohn) eventually learns that
Moses was a Jewish slave’s son — and that’s all Ramses needs.
Moses is banished and winds up in a village, where he marries and has a son. He has visions of a sternfaced young boy who calls himself “I Am” (as in, God), as plagues descend on Egypt. Following the mass death of firstborns, including Ramses’ son, the slaves follow Moses across the desert, until they hit a watery roadblock.
Scott’s staging of the Red Sea scene is technically cool but dramatically a drip. The same goes for the plagues and other big-ticket moments (the talking burning bush is a silent azure brushfire; the Commandments are an afterthought). As with Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah,” “Exodus” strives for realism amid its Biblical lore, which strips the tale of poetry and power.
Ironically, only in its casting does “Exodus” recall, negatively, Old Hollywood, a time when John Wayne played Genghis Khan, Marlon Brando could be Emiliano Zapata and Charlton Heston could play anyone. Bale is an extraordinary actor, but the guttural Batman-in-the-wilderness thing he does here feels like a student so unprepared for a test that he just wings it.
Edgerton (“The Great Gatsby”) is even more out of place, while Turturro, Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley (as a noble Jewish leader) suffer through traditional, and semi-embarrassing, cameos.
Scott — whose best films remain “Alien,” “Blade Runner” and “Gladiator” — has said that the reality of blockbusters meant he couldn’t cast unknown but ethnically appropriate actors. But there could still have been inspiration, like, maybe, a Jewish actor as Moses. As for Ramses, the movie missed a chance to make “star is born”-type headlines with an Egyptian actor.
Should this whole thing just be ignored? As Yul Brynner’s Ramses said in the original: “So let it be written, so let it be done.”