Alexander - Director's Cut

Colin Farrell plays the title role in 'Alexander'.

Herald rating: **

Alexander was born in 356BC, son of King Phillip II of Macedonia, the cockpit state squeezed between Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania. Dominated by his mother, Olympias, he was taught by the philosopher Aristotle, led troops into battle at age 18, and got the big corner office when dad died two years later.

He whipped the Tri-Nations champions, Persia, and went on to win the Known World Cup. He died suddenly in 323 BC at age 32 after a bout of heavy drinking; some suggest malaria, some say he was poisoned, though no cause of death has been proved. He had a really cool horse called Bucephalus.

That is pretty much all that's known for sure about Alexander, and it would have taken you about 15 seconds to read. Oliver Stone spins it out to 158 minutes in his "newly inspired, faster-paced, more action-packed" Director's Cut. Which means that he's cut 18 minutes and added another 10 from the version that was laughed out of the multiplexes around Christmas.

Stone maintains that he's tightened up the narrative, improved the movie's somewhat rambling structure and cut to the chase quicker. If this is true, I'm even more thankful that I resisted any temptation to waste an evening and most of the following night on seeing the cinema version.

The director felt that this movie summed up almost everything he'd done in his previous career, and we must agree. It's got bits of every earlier film: the battles of Platoon, the backstabbing of Wall Street, the conspiracies of JFK, the gore of Born on the Fourth of July, the excesses of The Doors, the tragedy of Nixon and the locker-room speeches of Any Given Sunday. Fortunately, those were individual movies; here he shoehorns the lot into one epic.

It's a wonderful spectacle, marvellous de Mille-scale sets, gorgeously themed set-pieces, and those who want to see a bloody big stoush will get plenty of blood and some big stoushes.

But the story still jumps around all over the time and place, dictated from the memories of an elderly Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), Alexander's general and possibly illegitimate brother.

Colin Farrell is less than convincing as the brilliant strategist and soldier who took on the world, and its greatest armies, and beat them: he looks like nothing so much as a young man from Ponsonby who's spent too much time at Les Mills and has an uncomfortable relationship with his mother.

Since his mother is played by Angelina Jolie, that's probably a reasonable assumption. It may also explain why he prefers to hang out with his boyhood friend, Hephaistion (Jared Lato), rather than his wife, Roxane (Rosario Dawson).

The two-disc edition features Stone's commentary, explaining why he made the cuts and alterations to his cinema version. With the length of the film, that's what you get on the first disc. The second features an 85-minute documentary by his son, Sean Stone, that goes behind the scenes with the director, actors, crew, discussing the historical character, their take on his life, and the costumes, sets ... zzzzz ... Finally, there's a short feature in which Vangelis talks about his soundtrack.

* DVD, Video rental today