Troy
dir. Wolfgang Petersen
First things first--let's get the whining about Homer's epic text being mutilated for the film out of the way. Troy may be many things, but it certainly isn't poetic. Stuff's been swapped around, characters fiddled with, etc. etc. Taking all that into account, I went into Troy expecting just a grand, traditional ancient war movie with plenty of marquee idols and British thespians that I could enjoy. But it didn't even work as that. The film is grand and great-looking (I expected no less considering its gazillion-dollar budget) but it's hampered by a diabolically bad screenplay from David Benioff, who I expected far better from after the excellent 25th Hour. It is then further compounded by near-total failure by the fantastic cast to perform even adaquately, the confused and muddled handling of the action scenes and the NEVER-ENDING length.


Perhaps I'm being a little harsh. To be honest, the main fault is the dialouge the poor cast is forced to speak--clunky, repetitive, derivative trash that offends its Homeric origins. Some of the actors rise above this to be watchable enough. Eric Bana (although he's helped with having the most sympathetic character in the film) continues his track record of having a wonderful screen presence in all of his films, and his sections are easily the best. Sean Bean, too, is pretty great as Odysseus, and I could go for an Odyssey film with him (as long as Petersen and Benioff aren't involved). Peter O'Toole mostly sleepwalks, but his wonderful face and voice mean he's always interesting to watch. The rest of the cast have a lot to answer for. As Achilles, Brad Pitt looks the part (he looks GREAT) but he gives a total one-note performance, lending no depth at all to his role. Orlando Bloom, an actor who's been barely getting by on his looks so far, is resoundingly awful as Paris, his every second onscreen dragging the film even further into the mud. The rest of the players are all totally wasted, with all the great supporting roles of the story turned into one-dimensional, one-expression caricatures. Brian Cox and Brendan Gleeson snarl and say "my brother" a lot, Julie Christie looks wistful and seems to be reading off of an autocue and Saffron Burrows and Rose Byrne seem to have had their personalities sucked out and replaced with polystyrene. Amazingly, Diane Kruger isn't as bad as I thought she'd be--but she's still pretty bad.


Despite being bored senseless by the dialogue scenes, I was at least expecting some decent action. But for the first two hours, all of the battle scenes are actually quite poorly done--blurred hacking obscured by bad editing and camerawork. For the final siege, it does pick up, and Achilles and Hector's duel in the sand is pretty good. But nothing in the film has the gripping power or excitement of the far superior Gladiator, an obvious inspiration (all the way down to the incredibly irritating wailing-woman voice on the score). The ending is fine but everything is quite hastily wrapped up (they never even bother explaining the reason for Achilles' weak heel). Overall, had the script been totally overhauled, some of the parts recast, and about an hour removed, Troy might have approached something resembling real quality. Sadly, though, it's just an oily campfest that swings from being enormously dull to mildly entertaining. In fact, with badly performed one-dimensional characters, terrible dialogue, lots of sweaty sex scenes and fighting, Troy might work as a daytime soap opera. Maybe then, it wouldn't be so inexcusable.

* 1/2