The reviews are in for Oliver Stone's "Alexander" and they are not looking that good.
This is what the Critics are saying...
"Puerile writing, confused plotting and shockingly off-note performances make Oliver Stone's epic film a disappointment."
Manohla Dargis - New York Times
"You could literally chop Alexander up into six 30-minute blocks, reassemble it at random, and the movie would make the exact same amount of sense (i.e. none). "
Scott Weinberg, EFILMCRITIC.COM
"Like Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, Alexander is an overindulgent, sprawling specimen of the director's lavish strengths and harrowing weaknesses."
Phil Villarreal, ARIZONA DAILY STAR
"Pretty much a mess, an alternately turgid and florid movie that feels like a drugged-out version of a Cecil B. DeMille epic."
Frank Swietek, ONE GUY'S OPINION
"It's a perplexing muddle: Every moment of spectacular battlefield action is offset by unintentionally hilarious scenes from Alexander's private life."
James Sanford, KALAMAZOO GAZETTE
"Stone appears to be assembling this ... jigsaw puzzle on the fly. There are more bottom-out scenes than high points. He drags it out for almost three backside-numbing hours."
Larry Ratliff, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
"An enormous cinematic mess. Alexander is not so much mind-numbingly boring as it is intriguingly nonsensical."
Dustin Putman, THEMOVIEBOY.COM
"Nixon in sandals."
Thomas Peyser, STYLE WEEKLY (RICHMOND, VA)
"While Alexander certainly isn't great, it's not nearly as bad as many would have you believe."
Chuck O'Leary, FANTASTICA DAILY
"It is such a majestic disaster, that I have a bizarre sort of affection for it, like for a weirdly deformed child, maybe."
Eugene Novikov, FILM BLATHER
"The Macedonian Candidate"
Rob Nelson, CITY PAGES, MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL
"The drippy romantic death-bed dialogue reads like it was swiped from an episode of 'One Macedonian Life to Live.'"
Donald Munro, FRESNO BEE
"Farrell often looks constipated, like he needs to get off that horse and hit the commode as opposed to hold onto his troops or his audience."
Susan Michals, FILMSTEW.COM
"A flop of massive proportions, Alexander is a diffuse and incoherent historical epic that fails to engage intellectually or emotionally. "
Emanuel Levy, EMANUELLEVY.COM
"A dull, humorless mess with nothing to say about Alexander."
Chris Hewitt, ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS
"This half-cocked creation is ostensibly about the Macedonian king but doubles as an allegory for both George W. Bush’s political career and Stone’s own struggle with history."
Ed Gonzalez, SLANT MAGAZINE
"A passionate, character-driven work of sinew and gristle."
Duane Dudek, MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
"As if Stone was trying to one-up the legendary Great himself by going all over the map, he reaches for so much and dies so early."
Erik Childress, EFILMCRITIC.COM
"Alexander is Oliver's most stupidly awesome (and awesomely stupid) movie since The Doors."
Sean Burns, PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY
"It's anybody's guess what Oliver Stone was thinking by making a film about Alexander the Great that skips over nearly every historical event that earned him that moniker."
Rob Blackwelder, SPLICEDWIRE
"Alexander the So-So"
Staci Layne Wilson, FANTASTICA DAILY
"A swollen behemoth of a celluloid monster sometimes mildly interesting, but most of the time downright boring."
Frank Wilkins, REELTALK MOVIE REVIEWS
"Alexander often seems a couple of heartbeats away from turning into a gay porno film."
Jeffrey Westhoff, NORTHWEST HERALD (CRYSTAL LAKE, IL)
"Towards the end of this movie, I wanted to kill Alexander just to get it over with and go home. Even Rosario Dawson’s supposedly stunning nudity was over-hyped."
Willie Waffle, WAFFLEMOVIES.COM
"Watching this film is like going to a bad history class where the teacher is a poor storyteller."
John Venable, SUPERCALA.COM
"Oliver Stone doesn't just create trainwrecks. He knocks the train off the rails, sets it on fire, then kills every person onboard. (And takes three hours to do it.)"
Eric D. Snider, ERICDSNIDER.COM
"3-hour borefest."
Steve Rhodes, STEVE RHODES' INTERNET REVIEWS
"'By the glorious man-meat of Apollo,' Colin says, 'this film is creaking to its final scene!'"
Mark Ramsey, MOVIEJUICE!
"Represents everything that’s wrong with the big, bloated Hollywood pseudo-epic: Too much with the lavish and not enough connecting with viewers"
Jon Popick, PLANET SICK-BOY
"Consistently undisciplined and frustratingly unfocused."
Glen Oliver, IGN FILMFORCE
"A big misfire, a big bore, and a big fat waste of time."
Sean O'Connell, FILMCRITIC.COM
"With its rampant homoeroticism, elaborate costumes and jumbled fight choreography, one would assume this is a Joel Schumacher flick not an Oliver Stone production."
Jon Niccum, LAWRENCE JOURNAL-WORLD
"So awful that it's almost good."
Scott Nash, THREE MOVIE BUFFS
"Makes its big screen debut with all the pomp and circumstance expected of most sword and sandal epics..."
Eric Moro, NOW PLAYING MAGAZINE
"The real Alexander the Great conquered the world. Oliver Stone’s touchy-feely-weepy Alexander would be lucky to last three rounds against Margaret O’Brien."
Tony Medley, TONYMEDLEY.COM
"Our history teachers may have been bores, but at least the bell rang before they became wearying."
Harvey S. Karten, COMPUSERVE
"From a visual standpoint, Alexander is phenomenal"
Stefan Halley, HERO REALM
"Instead of flowing one into the other, the scenes from Alexander's extraordinary 33 years of life too often come at the filmgoer like turned pages from Ptolemy's book."
Jack Garner, ROCHESTER DEMOCRAT AND CHRONICLE
"Alexander - The Not-So-Great. There's nothing like a Greek tragedy to stir up emotions - only here the scenes that should grab your attention are spoiled by overkill."
Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone, THEMOVIECHICKS.COM
"Mel Gibson has his 33-year-old martyr with which to identify, now Oliver Stone has a 33-year-old-minus-one-month one of his own."
Walter Chaw, FILM FREAK CENTRAL
"This movie is unremittingly dull, visually unappealing, narratively muddled, inadvertently campy, wretchedly performed and that's just for starters."
Matt Brunson, CREATIVE LOAFING
"Steeped in an all-consuming aura of audacious indulgence."
Jeanne Aufmuth, PALO ALTO WEEKLY
"Alexander has aspirations of greatness, hoping to be christened an intellectual super-spectacle for brainy moviegoers. The sad truth is that it will probably numb more brain cells than it will stimulate."
Philip Wuntch, DALLAS MORNING NEWS
"Even if it doesn't conquer its world, Stone's Alexander is worth the battle. Like JFK and Fourth of July, it hot-wires history and politics into a wild, memorable, breathtaking ride."
Michael Wilmington, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"There's nothing fresh about this plodding endeavor, nowhere it goes that other films have not gone before."
Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"Oliver Stone's biopic of Alexander the Great is spectacular, earnest and a bit of a yawn."
Jan Stuart, NEWSDAY
"This movie does everything to the max."
Jeff Strickler, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
"So misconceived, so shrill, so fetishy is Oliver Stone's epic, so unintentionally hilarious a stew of paganism and Freudianism, that it makes Conan the Barbarian look like Gladiator."
Carrie Rickey, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
"Despite a budget reportedly north of $150 million, Stone fails to make war on an epic scale, preferring to allow Alexander to talk the world to death."
Bruce Newman, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
"I respect Stone as a filmmaker, but this movie is punishment rather than entertainment."
Bill Muller, ARIZONA REPUBLIC
"An intelligent and ambitious picture that crucially lacks dramatic flair and emotional involvement."
Todd McCarthy, VARIETY
"The storytelling is so ham-fisted as to induce titters."
Kirk Honeycutt, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
"Stone's failures with this film are largely honorable, but occasionally he miscalculates and strikes so badly off-key that he seems tone deaf."
Eric Harrison, HOUSTON CHRONICLE
"A sprawling epic that truly sprawls."
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
"A long, lumpy trip with a charismatic guide and some brilliant detours."
Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE
"A ponderous death march of a story that seemingly never ends."
Paul Clinton, CNN
"Although some aspects of Oliver Stone's sword-and-sandals epic are worthy of mention (and even praise), they are dwarfed by the missteps and examples of bad judgment."
James Berardinelli, REELVIEWS
"Stone seems to identify with the slaughterer general, in whatever era he's in."
Michael Atkinson, VILLAGE VOICE
"Alexander the Great will have to wait for another time and another director before justice can fully be achieved"
John A. Nesbit, CULTUREDOSE.NET
"Even at the end of three hours, the accents still never stopped being an annoyance. "
Rebecca Murray, ABOUT.COM
"A horrendously bad movie, a genuine 40-car pile-up of literally epic proportions, a three-way head-on collision of bad writing, bad acting, and bad direction."
Nell Minow, MOVIE MOM AT YAHOO! MOVIES
"Time, it has been said, waits for no man—a fact I was keenly aware of two minutes into the nearly three-hour debacle that is "Alexander.""
Jeffrey Lyles, GAZETTE (MD)
"[A] disaster of a film, three hours of butt-numbing tedium punctuated by moments of hilarious high camp."
MaryAnn Johanson, FLICK FILOSOPHER
"An overstuffed Thanksgiving turkey: a tedious, uninspiring, repetitious historical epic filled with sappy symbolism and overt homosexuality"
Susan Granger, WWW.SUSANGRANGER.COM
"Listless, uninspired film."
Phoebe Flowers, SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL
"Ironically, there is little in Oliver Stone's dream project that marks it as an Oliver Stone film"
Laura Clifford, REELING REVIEWS
"Alexander is unavoidably a problematic epic, but it has integrity and deserves an audience willing to engage in Stone's dialogue."
Peter Canavese, GROUCHO REVIEWS
"If there ever was an historical figure deserving of study for what he accomplished in expanding empire and political geography, it would be Alexander leading all others."
Jules Brenner (FC), VARIAGATE.COM
"Boldly acted, absorbing and satisfying as a history lesson."
William Arnold, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
