Review: 'Exodus: Gods and Kings' a plague on theaters (w/video)

Don't expect Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings to become an Easter television tradition like The Ten Commandments. The commercials likely would steal the show.

This ponderous new version of the Moses legend scrupulously avoids comparison to Cecil B. DeMille's pious imagination, wrought a half-century before CGI. Even the Red Sea fails as spectacle, not majestically parting like Charlton Heston's but sinking to low tide, a symbol for the entire movie. No basket in the bull rushes, no serpent-staff miracles. Commandments are footnotes; the bush burns on low flame.

On the plus side, Scott's plagues are cool. But it's a long slog to crocodile rocking, pestilence and Proactiv-proof sores.

Rather than Heston's bare-chested masculinity as Moses, we get Christian Bale's sullen charisma and a capacity for violence bordering on mania. This Moses doesn't mind throwing down, but in a reverential way, you know. He'd rather smite you with revisionist scripture but spears and swords will work.

Scott begins in the middle, when Moses and his adoptive brother Ramses (Joel Edgerton, easy on the guyliner, please) are warriors for Egypt's pharaoh Seti (John Turturro, an instant Razzie contender). A seer with a really bad track record predicts one will save the other and rule next. That turns out to be Moses, bailing out Ramses in a first-reel chariot scrum.

Soon, Moses gets the news from elder Nun (Ben Kingsley) that he's actually Hebrew, like the slaves his empire exploits. That creates a deadly rift between Moses and Ramses, who refuses to let his people go.

The screenplay mostly plays it by the Good Book, without the surreality that Darren Aronofsky lent Noah earlier this year. That film's boldest move was depicting fallen angels as lava-crusted Transformers, an exaggeration with direct biblical inspiration. Scott's writers aren't audacious by those standards, or even DeMille's, who sometimes turned scripture into soap opera.

The movie's oddest twist is depicting God as a petulant schoolboy in diapers (Isaac Andrews), taunting Moses for not moving fast enough on this "free the slaves and wreak vengeance on Egypt" thing. This God is all tantrums and destruction, so when Ramses asks in the midst of plagues why anyone worships him, it's a tougher question than Scott wishes to explore.

Speaking of plagues, Exodus: Gods and Kings offers some doozies. It's a domino effect with crocodiles swarming the Nile like a biblical Jaws retread, bloodying the water with dead fish and fishermen, drawing flies swarming thick as the locusts, spreading pustules across Egyptian skin. Even Ramses, who's already wearing too much bronzer.

Exodus: Gods and Kings caps a year in which faith-based filmmaking and audiences proved more profitable for Hollywood than it has since, well, DeMille's time. Yet not one frame of Scott's movie matches his reverential showmanship. There's a new plague in town, at a theater near you.

Contact Steve Persall at spersall@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8365. Follow @StevePersall.