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Troy
(2004)
Dir: Wolfgang Petersen
Holy fuck … does this movie suck. If you want to wipe you ass with ten bucks, but don’t want to risk the paper cut, buy your way into this overdrawn, soulless behemoth. To treat the Iliad as a sandals-and-spears version of Saving Private Ryan, is beyond folly. It’s been a little while, but I don’t remember Homer’s epic poem exactly brimming over with heroics and nobility. I seem to remember a bunch of self-possessed snivelers, dodging lightning bolts and lip-tickling Apollo’s butthole. That might be a bit immoderate, but this movie seriously has no soul. It is a bunch of swollen CGI battle scenes, limply strung together by the more lackluster, narrative elements of the fable, tepidly acted out. The only person who seems to be having any fun at all is Brian Cox, who chews up the platinum scenery as if it were of Nilla wafer, and Agamemnon, a ravenous preschooler. Eric Bana is the only other cast member who tries at all. He is earnest and human as Hector, and he’s locked in an isolation booth. I’ll submit, it was rad when Orlando Bloom was sporting pointy ears and Wicca boots, saying shit like, “A crimson dawn … blood was shed here last night,” and I hardly protested his swashbuckling jive either, but the corny dialogue is getting a little soggy, bro. Relative newcomer Diane Kruger, as Helen, has a face that could maybe launch a couple of schooners, but a thousand battleships, nay. Peter O’Toole, I know he’s a big sandy thespian, but his aloofness here, as Priam, made me want to bury my head in the beach. He’s probably not to blame for the halfhearted dialogue, but his delivery is overreaching at best. And hey, guess what else, Brad Pitt is smokin’ hot. He’s better looking than most women, but that doesn’t help him carry a film. As a supporting actor, he’s fantastic--in Twelve Monkeys, Snatch, Fight Club, even Kalifornia he’s very convincing--but as the lead in Troy, he’s more wooden than that hollow horse. Petersen should have taken a few pages from the book of Desmond Davis and Ray Harryhausen (Clash of the Titans, director and stop-motion effects mastermind respectively). A good movie about mythological times, needs heapings of mythology to work properly. I don’t want a history lesson from Hollywood, I want to see Zeus floating on a cloud jerking off, wondering who to sodomize next. Shit, the parallels there are a little too close for comfort
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