Review: Exodus: Gods and Kings

City Paper grade: C-

I have no idea whether or not Ridley Scott is a religious man. After spending two and a half hours watching him lavishly retell one of the Bible’s most vivid stories, that’s kind of a problem. After all, there was never any doubt that Cecil B. DeMille skimmed his Good Book to get to the bits with flesh and spectacle. But Scott’s version of Moses’ showdown with the pharaoh is less crowd-pleasing than mass-appeasing, hedging its bets on the miraculous. Christian Bale’s Moses may or may not be hallucinating the stubborn-child God who orders him to free his people from 400 years of slavery — the patriarch does have a penchant for slamming his head into unyielding surfaces and is often spied angrily talking to himself by right-hand man Joshua (a near-silent waste of Aaron Paul’s frenetic energy, putting him in the company of the barely there Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley). Moses’ guidance through the desert might be sheer blind luck, the parting of the Red Sea could be chalked up to currents, and the plagues that afflict Egypt are caused by a carefully drawn chain of plausible events, beginning with a visceral crocodile attack that turns out to be this would-be epic’s most thrilling moment. Then Scott gets to the ultimate plague, the death of the firstborn, and realizing that he has no rational explanation just sends a shadow to do the dirty work. That lack of inspiration pervades the film, as the director seems torn between the daunting prospect of recreating oft-filmed moments and the demands of an effects-craving blockbuster audience. The result is a dull paralysis, throwing up a shrug to heaven that should prove unsatisfying to the faithful and the nonbelieving alike.