Exodus: Gods and Kings *** (2014, Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley, John Turturro, Ben Mendelsohn) – Movie Review

The Gospel according to director Ridley Scott is a typically beautifully crafted, visually stunning affair that he tries desperately hard to turn into Gladiator 2, with Moses as an action hero, and inevitably mostly fails. It’s not a Roman action epic, it’s a Biblical epic in which Moses leads 600,000 slaves on a journey of escape from Egypt. For all its faults, though, it’s immeasurably better than Noah.

Yet this is yet another 2014 movie that’s drowning in its own CGI, with Scott lining up with the directors believing bigger is better and forgetting to have any small is beautiful or any real human scale. And the movie itself is a total dinosaur, way out of its time. These religious epics were lumbering and outmoded 50 years ago, and there’s nothing Scott can do about that, even with his ultra-expensive CGI paintbox.

On the plus side, the casting’s good and the performances are too. Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, John Turturro and Ben Kingsley may not be obvious casting as defiant leader Moses, Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses, Seti and Nun, but they all do a grand job. Bale is excitingly manly, while Edgerton and Ben Mendelsohn (as Viceroy Hegep) are splendidly camp as the villains. This is old-school epic stuff, and all the more welcome.

Edgerton is nearly as good as Joachin Phoenix who plays the similar role in Gladiator, and the same’s true of Bale in the Russell Crowe role. That’s high praise, by the way. What happened to Sigourney Weaver‘s role as Tuya? All her dialogue’s been cut.  And Ewen Bremner‘s Scottish-speaking Expert is an own goal for the film. Apart from that, and the odd Australian vocal, there are no cast problems.

Also on the plus side are some excellent battles (particularly the opening one) and the terrifying deadly plagues sequence that turns the movie for a while into a much more exciting horror film. I suppose I ought to say too that Exodus is essentially a good story that the four credited writers have made much sense and cohesion out of. In a long narrative, and a shortish running time for an epic, it’s only very occasionally unclear and confusing, and the dialogue is very good, giving the actors no problems at all. The few quieter, dialogue-driven moments go very well, making you want many more. When it sticks to the drama of the clash between Moses and Ramses it lights up.

Minuses include, ironically, almost all the religious aspects of the movie, with God’s commandments relayed to Moses through a creepy child who seems to belong in a horror film. Trying to stage the parting of the Red Sea realistically as a bad weather event is a terrible mistake. How we miss Charlton Heston, Cecil B DeMille and their Ten Commandments at these moments. Kitsch though they were, they somehow worked.

Let’s hope this Biblical cycle is short lived and that Scott will go back to sci-fi. He’s still toying with doing Bladerunner 2, and the wrong turn of Exodus: Gods and Kings just proves this is a must.

The film is dedicated to ‘My brother Tony’.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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