An earnest but dull film that tries to have it both ways with religion (appealing to both the faithful and secular) but will probably leave no one truly happy, and I’ll admit I dozed off for about ten minutes. Honestly, I think Darren Aronofsky’s unfairly maligned “Noah” was a much more interesting movie.
What Works: The story of how Moses freed the slaves is a great one, but this isn’t a great telling of it. Christian Bale gets all the mileage he can out of what is—weirdly enough—an under-written interpretation of Moses, but there’s really not enough for him to do. And I know that sounds crazy considering how much happens in this film. In Aronofsky’s “Noah,” you got a real sense of who Noah was, but this portrait of Moses never really gets under his skin, and Bale might be more of a cipher than he needs to be. Ridley Scott’s direction has a great visual look, but not enough going on beneath the surface…
What Doesn’t Work: …And what a bizarre surface it is since this film has some of the most questionable casting of a movie this year. John Turturro as an Egyptian king? Sigourney Weaver as his wife? And freakin’ Joel Edgerton as their son, the pharaoh Ramses? Edgerton is one of those actors you cast when you can’t get Tom Hardy, but he’s spectacularly miscast here, as he can’t even fully hide his Australian accent, let alone pass for anything close to Egyptian. And it’s not like he and Bale really have spectacular on-screen chemistry…it just kind-of comes across as two generic action heroes going at each other, and you don’t get a real sense of the psychological depth and rich history that exists between these characters who grew up together. They seem more like strangers than emotional siblings.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Too much of this movie just reads like a “greatest hits” collection of the “Exodus” story, and it all comes off feeling a little too impersonal. In Scott’s “Gladiator” (arguably his last good movie), the film had a neurotic ace beneath the grandeur of its “big movie” spectacle: Joaquin Phoenix’s bitterly eccentric and all-too-easily-wounded emperor. Exodus needed something or someone to add a real charge to its generic “Epic Picture” feel.