Alexander

We've all heard the dodgy pre-advance reports but surely Alexander couldn't be that bad, could it? The short answer is yes - almost every note struck in this three hour wannabe epic is a bum one, none more so than Stone's self-conscious script and the shockingly off note performance of Colin Farrell as the Macedonian warrior emperor, a man who died at 32 but had already conquered most of the known world.

Openly borrowing from Citizen Kane, Stone opens with Alexander's death and jumps backwards, picking up with our hero as a young man, whose fortunes are shaped by his father, the one-eyed Philip (Val Kilmer), and his mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie). As soon as he succeeds his father in somewhat dubious circumstances, Alexander (now played by Colin Farrell, sporting the worst haircut this side of a Michael Bolton convention) sets about, well, getting away from momma dearest and, almost by default, conquering most of the planet in the process.

Oliver Stone's been trying to make a biopic of the Macedonian emperor for the last two decades but you wouldn't know it from what unfolds in Alexander. His script, written with Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis, never gets close to scratching the surface of this extraordinary man, and is content to overplay his relationship with Olympias at the expense of virtually everything else in the film. Given the sedative, one-dimensional nature of the screenplay, it would take all of Stone's visual brilliance and a stunning central performance to make Alexander supersede its narrative limitations. That they never materialise makes Alexander something of an exercise in ass-seat endurance rather than the sweeping epic it should be.