Mongol.

"Mongol marks a personal first for this reviewer: a bloated epic so boring and unengaging that by its numbing conclusion (the word anticlimactic can only be used for stories that actually build) he was zapped even of the conviction to hate it." Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE.

"Here's a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "[I]t's probably the last thing you'd expect - great fun."

Updated through 6/7.

"Directed by the protean and prolific Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov (who wrote the script with Arif Aliyev), it is, among other things, a stubborn defense of old-fashioned, grand-scale moviemaking," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "While it takes a sympathetic view of young Genghis Khan - whose name, in the West, is a synonym for rapacity - it does not force him into conformity with modern sensibilities. His world feels authentically raw and refreshingly archaic, and also strangely beautiful."

"Once best-known for the lyrical, haunting Prisoner of the Mountains, an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella updated to reflect today's Chechen conflict, the director has abandoned his earlier, subtle take on the cost of war in favor of something cruder," writes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun:

His last film, Nomad, was a cack-handed Kazakh Braveheart, a laughably acted, lamentably written slab of nationalist kitsch redeemed only by its deft use of a landscape so lovely, so strange, and so huge that John Ford should have been there to film it.

That same terrain, or somewhere very much like it, adds an equally hallucinatory grandeur to Mongol. What's more, like Nomad, the new film shows clear traces of 'Eurasianism,' a distinctively Russian, distinctly shaky interpretation of history sometimes deployed to explain why Western-style democracy could never work in Russia. Whatever the similarities between the two movies, however, Mongol is a significantly better film.

Time Out's Tom Huddleston finds Mongol "a gracefully mounted, stunningly photographed historical account, fascinating in its attention to detail if somewhat unengaging in its story and characters."

Online listening tip. Bodrov is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Updates: "[T]he battles are worth the price of admission. I was stunned and impressed," writes Sheila O'Malley at the House Next Door. "Bodrov may have wanted to humanize Genghis Khan, but what I was left with was admiration, awe, and fear for who he was as a military leader. I yawned through the sex scenes and the domestic scenes, and found myself yearning for those masked guys to leap on their horses again, and gallop towards each other across the steppe, arrows flying through the air, blood spurting out behind the horses in a slow-motion fan of carnage."

"As Genghis-Khan-to-be, [Tadanobu] Asano projects a preternatural self-possession, rarely raising his voice above a low mumble," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "But that very stillness makes him more formidable. Though Asano is a shade delicately built for a great warrior, he's more than convincing as a man with the resolve to conquer the world.... My only problem with Mongol is that - how often in life do you get to write this sentence? - Genghis Khan is a little too nice."

Update, 6/7: "Mongol does a lot of 'sweeping,'" notes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "It moves from sweeping vistas to sweeping battles and when it stops sweeping, it really has no idea what to do; it merely waits for the next opportunity to sweep."

Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2008 6:52 AM