Average Rating: 3.9/10
Reviews Counted: 194
Fresh: 32 | Rotten: 162
Even at nearly three hours long, this ponderous, talky, and emotionally distant biopic fails to illuminate Alexander's life.
Average Rating: 4/10
Critic Reviews: 41
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 36
Even at nearly three hours long, this ponderous, talky, and emotionally distant biopic fails to illuminate Alexander's life.
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Average Rating: 2.7/5
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The fourth film to chronicle the life of fourth-century B.C. ruler Alexander the Great, Oliver Stone's Alexander stars Colin Farrell as the titular Macedonian conqueror. The film follows the young king as he leads his forces on a bloody empirical conquest across the known world, taking large parts of Asia and the Middle East to amass a giant empire, all by the time he turned 25. Anthony Hopkins co-stars as Ptolemy I along with Rosario Dawson as Roxane, Angelina Jolie as Olympias, Jared Leto as
R, 2 hr. 55 min.
Nov 24, 2004 Wide
Aug 2, 2005
$34.3M
Warner Bros. Pictures
All Critics (202) | Top Critics (41) | Fresh (33) | Rotten (167) | DVD (33)
Though the battles have the blood-and-sinew bravado you expect from Oliver Stone, this three-hour buttnumbathon is hamstrung by a hectoring grandiosity, not new to Stone, and a nod toward caution, which is.
A lunk-headed train wreck that looks like a tag sale in a 323 B.C. supermarket in old Peking.
At a reported cost of $155 million, Alexander qualifies as a super-spectacle in every respect but one -- namely in its neurotic, confused and sexually ambidextrous hero.
Sluggish, unsmiling, and almost as limp as the feather fans with which our heroes are gently aerated on their trip to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
It's just a wild, glorious, wacky mess that I found really entertaining.
Call it Alexander the Grate, because, over the marathon of its three-hour running time, this wonky epic really does get on your nerves.
For the lucky few that see this without ever having viewed the first cut, they may wonder what all the criticism was about in the first place.
Alexander the person was great. This movie isn't.
General mistakes all across the board contribute and reinforce each other to bring it down
Stone doesn't present characters that the audience can believe in, even for one moment, as representative of their historic roles.
This oracular piece of hero-worship is perhaps the squarest film yet from this once-hip director.
Stone's Director's Cut is still too long and dragged out to be very effective.
Stone gives us some truly stirring visuals, music that soars and charges more often than not, and, um, performances that . . . Well, um, okay, about those performances . . .
the tragedy of Alexander appears to be that, like his hero, Stone has tried to go too far and has lost his way.
Unwieldy and flawed, but Stone remains a tornado in an era of airless formula and -- to paraphrase our Ptolemy -- its failings are greater than most films' successes.
Note: this review covers the theatrical version of the film. Oliver Stone's epic portrait of one of the greatest figures in history had the potential to be as epic, mythic, and great as the person it is about. What it turned out ot be instead was a bloated, hollow, unfocused mess filled with bland dialogue and some
June 9, 2006Super Reviewer
The version of Alexander I'm reviewing is the second or director's cut, which may or may not have some bearing on whether I influence anyone else as to whether or not they want to view this film. To be concise, this really stunk. It's a ponderous train wreck of a film, and I couldn't wait for it to end. Whether or not
October 13, 2011
Super Reviewer
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