Troy - Dir: W. Petersen, Feat: B. Pitt, E. Bana, O. Bloom

Ah, Troy, the story of a guy named... Troy. Well, it might have been more interesting had it been. It started well enough, with Brad Pitt's Achilles being roused from a night of drinking and whoring to do battle with Nathan Jones, the Australian Behemoth Ex-Pro Wrestler. The build up is huge... nobody in King Menelaus's army dares to fight this mighty warrior, but here comes Achilles. He hefts his sword, they face off, they glare, they sweat... and the fight lasts roughly two seconds. In fact, the entire fight is featured in the trailer. One stab. I know, I know, it shows us Achilles is the mightiest warrior in all the land. It also sets a bad precedent for the film - Scenes short on plot, followed by scenes with plot laboring to move the story forward. Well, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Here's Brad Pitt posing! Brad Pitt stabbing! Brad Pitt half-naked! Orlando Bloom for the tweens! Eric Bana half naked for those who prefer their men Aussie. There are moments of sheer glory in this movie, but they suffer from many things:
1. Poor script - Dialogue so ponderous even George Lucas would demand a rewrite.
2. The Lord of the Rings - I'm sorry. If you have two armies doing battle with swords and archers, if you have people making a desperate last stand in a fortress, if you have Orlando Bloom shooting a bow and arrow, you're not asking us to compare, you're daring us. And you're bound to fall flat on your face against the might of Peter Jackson's action-filled, STORY-DRIVEN epic (Is my writer's bias showing?).
3. Is it a Harlequin Romance? Is it a testosterone driven action extravaganza? For 1/2 a second, when we see Helen of Troy's butt, is it great? The answer to these questions is yes. But when you're asking people to sit still for two hours, give us drive, give us urgency... and most of all...
Don't condense an epic, years-long story arc into the course of weeks and months (or was it days?).
2 1/2 out of five stars.
Ladies may, of course, add points for Pitt-related flexing and bulging, much as they did for the "water flipping off the hat" scene in Legends of the Fall. My blog is not long enough to describe how awful that movie is.