Some choice bits from Stephanie Zacharek's review in Salon.com:
""Alexander" may have stars, but it's got no juice. The problem with epics these days -- among them massive clunkers like "Troy" and "King Arthur" -- isn't that they're simplistic and immature; it's that they lack Victor Mature. In striving to give us quality cinema, directors like Wolfgang Petersen, Antoine Fuqua and now Stone play everything so seriously that they never ignite our imaginations. Everything is expensive, and looks it -- filmmakers like these value costly authenticity far more than sex appeal, which is relatively cheap, although, sadly, much more rare."
"Yet, as elaborate as they are, neither of the two major battle sequences in "Alexander" resonate. They're suitably gory all right, and we do get to see Farrell on horseback, in a feathered helmet, going "Yaaaah!," his teeth tinged pink with blood. That's how it was in the old days, and yet Stone works so hard at making these battles feel so super-duper impressive that they end up seeming remote. What's far more interesting is Alexander's alleged bisexuality, which Stone is obsessed with. But he doesn't do justice to that, either. There are no graphic male sex scenes in "Alexander," but there are plenty of rummy allusions to Alexander's closeness with Hephaistion, and several scenes with boys and men frolicking and cavorting in a not particularly heterosexual way."
And Christopher Plummer appears in a toga as Aristotle (if you close your eyes, you can hear the rounded, figgy tones of Edward Everett Horton -- shades of Jay Ward again?), explaining to his young male students that they shouldn't necessarily deny their urges: "When men lie together and virtue pass between them -- that is good." You see, in olden times, homosexuality was clean and wholesome: You don't hear Aristotle extolling the virtues of a long, slow screw from a big, dumb guy.
"...But Stone sabotages any depth of feeling Farrell tries to put across. In the dramatic wedding-night sequence, Hephaistion appears in Alexander's bedchamber, bearing a ring for his beloved. Dressed in a scraggly fur vest, his eyes ringed with smudgy kohl, Leto looks like a wronged hippie chick, ready at any moment to fling himself down, tearfully, on his Indian bedpread while Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" plays over and over again on the turntable. (Leto tries hard, but trust me, no actor can survive that eyeliner."
"Jolie is the only actor here who gives the movie the shot of unvarnished camp glamour it needs."
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
~ Muhammad Ali
