Review: "Troy"
Starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Brian Cox, Peter O’Toole
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Summer is again upon us, and to remind us we've another costumed epic parading as insightful social drama. No, not Gladiator. This time out it's the oldest story ever told: a reinvention of Homer's The Iliad starring every young leading man in Hollywood.
The story: Paris (Bloom) and brother Hector (Bana), princes of Troy, visit Sparta to ally with its king, Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson). Paris seduces Menelaus's wife, Helen (Diane Kruger), and takes her home with him to meet his father, Priam (O'Toole). Menelaus seeks help in rescuing Helen and assaulting Troy from his brother, Agamemnon (Cox), who has been spreading his lands and increasing the strength of the emerging Greek state with the aide of his prized warrior, Achilles (Pitt). Achilles is open with his disdain for Agamemnon, but agrees to lead the charge.
Going to see Troy for the acting would be like going to see, well, The Lord of the Rings for the same reason: the computer wizardry and hokey voice-overs quell early on any hopes you may have of actually being taken somewhere new by the film.
Bloom, apparently deciding to make a career of bloated, over-produced epics, equally frustrates and annoys as the whimpering Paris, whose puppy love for another man's wife was all the excuse for war Agamemnon needed. Bana brings a believable nobility to Hector, the only character here to enjoy besides O'Toole's mournful and dignified Priam. As Achilles, Pitt oscillates between reluctantly growling the laughable, two-dimensional "inspirational" lines he's been saddled with, like "Immortality. Take it! It's yours!" Screenwriter David Benioff (25th Hour) is woefully committed to making us realize over and over again that yes, our acts do live on after us. Too bad Russell Crowe has already been there.
It's a popcorn flick, to be sure, a sandals-and-skirts brawl I wish had been around when I was in high school: it sure beats trudging through hundreds of pages of fairly boring verse. For injecting fresh thrills, however few, into an old story, Petersen should be thanked. But with a running time of almost three hours, he should've remembered: less is always more, and more is painfully less.
