Anyone who's seen Oliver Stone's wonderfully over-the-top "JFK" already knows the director's fatal flaw: he just doesn't know when to quit. Like that long 1991 conspiracy theory opus, Mr. Stone's "Alexander", a disjointed retelling of the life of Alexander the Great, is so full of subplots and characters that it ultimately collapses under its own ambition. Mr. Stone might have been better off making a multi-part miniseries about the famed Macedonian conqueror, since he clearly has enough material for it. Unfortunately, even at three hours, the director still hasn't decided what story he wants to tell.
Mr. Stone's script (co-written with Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis) starts with Alexander's death then jumps back to his youth and leaps forward in eight-year increments until, at one point, it jumps back in time again. Amazingly, however, all this temporal license fails to shed any light on the motivation of the king who, at 30, rules the entire known world. Who was he and what drove him? Was it the assassination of his father, the one-eyed King Philip (played with drunken uncertainty by Val Kilmer)? Was it the relentless nagging of his devious mother Olympias (Angelina Jolie, playing Lady Macbeth with a snake fetish and a store-bought Russian accent)? Or was it something about his needlessly vague homosexual relationship with boyhood pal Hephaistion (an appropriately dour Jared Leto) - though that affair seems to have consisted solely of dewy, sorrowful glances, in sharp contrast to Alexander's growling bedroom romp with Rosario Dawson as Roxane. Any one of these explanations might have made a great movie, but Mr. Stone wants to tell them all with equal emphasis.
In the end, we know little more about Alexander than we did going into the film. There are some wonderful moments (witness the eagle-eye-view of the Battle of Gaugamela), but they do not hold together into a cohesive whole (nor, for that matter, does the multi-accented cast). As Alexander, Colin Farrell, acting beneath a series of bad blonde hair-dos, acquits himself far better than Brad Pitt did in "Troy", but he's saddled with a character that has no arc so he's forced to act only in the moment and, typically, that breaks down into fits of screaming.
Mr. Stone's love for a good conspiracy shows throughout the film as Alexander's men slowly turn against him, but the director is not comfortable with a pre-20th century period epic. While the battles are vicious and, thankfully, show restraint with the computer-generated trickery, they lack the sure-handedness that Peter Jackson brought to the "Lord of the Rings" series.
There's a great movie about the life of Alexander the Great out there somewhere, in fact it may even be buried somewhere within Mr. Stone's sprawling, messy marathon, which would have us believe Alexander succeeded because his conquered his fear of death. I look forward to the day Mr. Stone conquers his own fear - of editing.
