Ben-Hur Review

Epic Fail

♦Tripwire Contributing Writer James DC grabbed his toga and his chariot and headed back in time to assess the latest Ben-Hur, directed by Timur Bekmambetov…

Ben-Hur
Director: Timur Bekmambetov
Stars: Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell, Morgan Freeman, James Cosmo
In cinemas now

If you are thinking of going to see this new version of Ben-Hur, be very careful about wasting your time and money. Remember that, at some point in the future, moments before your death, as you cast your mind back over the accomplishments and mistakes of your life (that is, if you are conscious at the time), you may very well come to deeply regret having wasted precisely two hours and three minutes of your precious, unique life on this humongous pile of excreta. Instead, for the same amount of time, you could have watched a spider crawl slowly up the wall or listened to the sounds of traffic outside your window – both immeasurably more entertaining and fulfilling pursuits than watching this wretched blot on the cinematic landscape. This execrable film is instantly forgettable and I have had to scour my memory to try and remember any details from it for this review; apart from the most heinous scenes which stand out like a sore thumb, everything else is just uninspired, imbecilic, sluggish and anodyne.

William Wyler’s famous 1959 adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel (the third, after two previous silent films) with its still-amazing chariot race sequence, plus a commanding central performance by Charlton Heston, is an absolute masterpiece in comparison to this utterly tedious, trite travesty. Sure, the ’59 version wasn’t the best of the Technicolour/Widescreen ‘Sword and Sandal’ type epics of the 1950s and 60s (1960’s Spartacus, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and 1958’s The Vikings, by Richard Fleischer, immediately spring to mind) but it effortlessly towers above this reprehensible movie-miscarriage. This latest stab at the once hugely popular Biblical Epic genre is just as bad, in its own way, as the awful and embarrassing Noah, by Darren Aronofsky, which blighted cinema screens across the world, in 2014. That one was meant to be about Noah’s Ark, but ended up being a cumbersome, incredibly immature and cringe-worthy ‘Fantasy’, seemingly aimed at 7 year old children, and which played fast and loose with the well-worn mythology – if you are going to adapt stories from the Bible, then at least get the basic ‘facts’ straight, for Christ’s sake! (The pathetic ‘rock-monsters’ in Noah were one of its worst crimes against cinema.) Ben-Hur makes many of the same mistakes, but on a rather different note.

I suppose that one shouldn’t expect any semblance of serious artistry from the director of the mind-numbingly inane and annoying Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), but Ben-Hur indeed takes the biscuit – it surely is the nadir of Timur Bekmambetov’s short career, so far. So, where the hell does one start with this vapid, cliche-ridden, putrescent boil of a movie?

I won’t bother to reiterate the details of the well known plot of Ben-Hur: if you consider yourself curious about cinema in general, but have never bothered to watch the 1959 version, then you seriously need to catch up. Suffice to say that it is set in ancient Jerusalem around the time of Jesus, and during the Roman empire. The story revolves around the to-and-fro power struggle between two ostensible brothers, who are set on different pathways and ideologies, and incorporates many layers of moral, historical, religious and sociopolitical text, and subtext. Or at least that is what it is meant to be about – not so with this version, which is certainly ‘epic’, but only of the failure type.

So to sum up, this new version is, at the very least, all of the following:

Boring: I actually started to fall asleep during the all-important chariot race – I’m not kidding, here. (To be fair, I was very tired at the time, having had just 3 hours of sleep the previous night, but I have been even more exhausted during other films and rarely ‘dropped off’ during them.) Watching a 2 hour Conservative Party political broadcast would have been more compelling than this lightweight crud, and with much more emotional or intellectual involvement elicited, even if it were disgust or anger, in such a case; this is simply a kind of cinematic ‘wallpaper’ and achieves absolutely nothing of any merit. One would have loads more fun watching the same old world go by whilst looking through the window of a London bus, on an overly familiar bus route, on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Just dull, dull, dull, in the extreme. Oh, and did I mention asinine? Yes, I did.

Stupid: it is full of repetitive, laborious, meaningless drivel, with an ersatz, bland, overly melodramatic script – there is no originality, depth, or subtext, consequently with no excitement or the merest of pleasures to be had. To make matters worse, many of the better, more complex elements of the ’59 film have been changed or excised altogether, supposedly to better accommodate a popcorn-gobbling, easily distracted, iPhone-checking, modern mass audience. And the cherry on the top of this crass, factory fodder confection is a vomit-inducing, lachrymose finale that negates any sense of jeopardy the central battle of wits between the two main protagonists, Judah Ben-Hur and Messala, may have previously evoked. (The original novel’s plot is far too complex to go into here, or to ever be faithfully adapted into a 2 hour film, so the commendable ’59 version is one of the yardsticks by which I am gauging this cinematic chariot-crash.)

Laughable: the acting, if one can call it that, is paper-thin and amateurish. Morgan Freeman (who plays Sheik Ilderim, who sets up the chariot race) doesn’t just phone-in his usual cliche and overly earnest schtick, he positively texts it in, with emojis to boot. (My girlfriend humorously noted that his overall look in this is reminiscent of the derided Star Wars character Jar Jar Binks, and that is perfectly in keeping with the historically anachronistic costumes; half of the cast seem to be wearing ‘Shoreditch Twat’ style tight jeans and shirts, not togas or Arabic/African dress, or whatever each individual would have worn, of the era.) Everyone either over or underacts: Jack Huston, who plays the central role of Judah Ben-Hur, must have missed out on those all-important acting genes from his prestigious family line of acting/directing royalty (Angelica Huston/John Huston/Walter Huston), because his performance here is hollow and unconvincing. There is no emotional pull, let alone nuance or subtlety, to the proceedings because of this lacklustre ambiance, overall. The general feeling, by the much hoped-for ending, is of having watched an instantly disposable, elongated 2 hour Marks & Spencer advert, or a nondescript, lower rank TV soap.

Sentimental: even though the ’59 film had its fair share of sentimentality and pomposity (which, remember, was de rigueur for such Hollywood movies of the era and can thus be partly excused, within a historical-relative context), this version takes such debilitating tics to awkward and ill-fitting extremes. The incongruous and sickly-sweet pop song at the end (by whichever witless and talent-free pop celebrity it is – I couldn’t find the ‘artiste’, online), laid over an illogical and wish-fulfilling happy ending, just confirms all of one’s suspicions that this film was made by brainless idiots, for brainless idiots.

Lifeless: for some reason, given that this is – supposedly – meant to be an ‘epic’, full of sublime landscapes, larger than life characters, phenomenal vistas, captivating drama, thrilling action and superb cinematography, most of Ben-Hur is shot in medium close-ups, on rather cramped, uninteresting sets, all redolent of the horribly ‘flat’, video-crisp shots of prosaic TV soap operas. But perhaps that is what the filmmakers were striving for, (erroneously) attempting something more ‘intimate’, ‘immediate’ or ‘authentic’ than the previous iterations? If correct, unfortunately for them – and more importantly for us, the viewers – this was a very short-sighted plan, because during pretty much the whole of the running time one is constantly comparing this version to the familiar scenes from the ’59 film which, if you are over forty and British, is indelibly welded onto your consciousness from countless TV screenings every Christmas, Easter and Bank Holiday weekend of the 1970s and ’80s. Basically, if one is to take on such a legendary, iconic film, one should pay knowing homage and go all-out, or nothing. Well, this limp, anaemic film decidedly falls into the ‘nothing’ category. There is absolutely no grit, grime or gravitas to the proceedings, again unlike the ’59 version, and the rushed, badly mishandled climax drives this home – this is an an antiseptic, kiddified version of the story. And don’t get me started on the various appearances of Jesus; regardless of whether you are a Christian or not, these scenes are pathetic, ridiculous and inordinately dumb.

Messy: the CGI-laden chariot race, which is meant to be the cornerstone of the whole film, is so hysterically edited – as usual with many contemporary Hollywood action sequences – that one cannot fully grasp or follow what is going on in the frame, thus diluting any sense of danger or risk. Hey, Hollywood, why don’t you just stop with the compulsory over the top ADHD style of shooting and editing of your action films? It’s so frustrating, given the disproportionate amount of money spent on such scenes. Audiences with any concept of decent, well crafted filmmaking have had enough of this absurd rubbish. Stop already….please. Moreover, the supposed action scene when a Roman ship – which Ben-Hur is tethered to as a rower slave – is attacked and sunk, flashes by with hardly any impact because it is so badly and mundanely handled; notwithstanding the immense potential of such a crucial scene, and in comparison to the vastly superior ’59 version.

Ben-Hur’s inherent problems no doubt have something to do with the way the Hollywood factory churns out such films these days, with an ever-increasing eye on the non-English speaking market and especially the massive Chinese and East Asian demographic; i.e. almost everything in a mega-budget movie is angled towards the lowest common denominator – a more accessibly visual, less cerebral and less language factored vector – and this negative trait is even more prevalent than in the past. (This is not to belittle ‘foreign’ audiences, just that the wider and more disparate the audience one tries to capture, the more one has to standardise or homogenise the given film ‘product’.)

One would have thought that a remake of the brilliant, iconic 1959 version of Ben-Hur, with the right director, screenplay and actors, would have been a shoo-in for Hollywood but, like many other mainstream or blockbuster American films of the last five years or so, this new version was cast adrift from the start and drained of all blood, specific intention, or any sense of idiosyncratic, aesthetic craft: it emerges from the most insipid concept of story and plot; a superficially shiny, yet soulless ‘going through the motions’ void at its core. The classic template was already there, and all it needed was a few refinements and tweaks for a contemporary audience, with some original elements thrown in, to get the requisite bums on seats and critical acclaim. But they spectacularly failed in this, and it is some kind of bizarro achievement to fumble this dead cert ball, in such a slapdash way.

Symbolically, this new Ben-Hur is just the latest nail in the coffin for the once inventive, stylish, enthralling artistic genius of the mainstream Hollywood studio system of old. If you all stay away in your droves, it may send a salient, much-needed message to the gormless, corporate suits now running Tinseltown, to its tragic detriment. Here’s hoping, but I ain’t holding my breath, because most of them seem to have a negligible concept of serious or quality filmmaking, and seemingly will keep rolling out such utter trash, all the way until Doomsday itself. More’s the pity if you waste your money and time on this cynical, money-orientated, myopic, talentless, thickheaded enterprise.

JAMES DC

Ben-Hur is in UK cinemas now

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