"Troy"

I hear a chorus, and not just a Greek one, of voices out there saying, "Who cares? Brad Pitt is hunky!" That depends, I think, on how one defines "hunky." Pitt isn't much of an actor, but he's sometimes serviceable as a swinging presence in pictures like Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11." In "Troy," with his Coppertoned haunches, his sandy blond tresses and his leonine pout, he's like a beach bum who's been ordered by his parents to get a job -- Jan-Michael Vincent with a bad attitude.

When we first meet Achilles, he's sound asleep on a furry animal skin, his limbs entwined with those of not one but two sleeping beauties: This here red-blooded male isn't to be mistaken for one of those "funny" Greeks, leather miniskirt or no. Later, we see him happily crossing swords with his cousin and bosom buddy Patroclus (who, despite his resemblance to one of the now-grown-up kids from Hanson, is really Garrett Hedlund). Later still, Achilles lounges on yet another animal skin, slugging wine from a cup, a disgruntled homo-neurotic advising Patroclus, who is dreamily devoted to him, to follow orders from no man. And even later, we see him rolling in bed with the sassy Apollonian priestess Briseus (Rose Byrne): After a bit of careful tussling in a brief competition to see who has the prettier hair, Achilles asserts his masculinity in the usual manner. We're given to understand that he rams it in, but tenderly -- Ancient Greece was a civilization, remember.

The battle scenes stink, the sex is bad, the beefcake is boring: At this point you may be wondering, does "Troy" at least give us a believable Helen -- a woman whose face might, conceivably, have launched 1,000 ships? The answer is, unfortunately, no. With her sun-kissed, bland sweetness, Kruger is pretty enough in a Darien, Connecticut, kind of way -- not exactly Helen of Troy, but maybe Helen of Abercrombie & Fitch. (Think of her as the face that launched 1,000 golf carts.) She's a limp presence, given to whimpering about all the trouble she's caused as men die around her left and right. "All those widows! I still hear them screaming," she intones feebly, without ever so much as dropping her nail file. (Contrast that with what Pauline Kael wrote of Irene Papas' Helen in Michael Cacoyannis' little-seen film "The Trojan Women": "She is not merely a beauty but the strongest woman one has ever seen, and the more seductive because of her strength ... She is not merely the cause of war, she is the spirit of war.")

The other performers in "Troy" march around pompously, taking their roles very, very seriously. Banas' Hector is dull and worthy, a lousy match for Pitt's stiff, arrogant Achilles -- you just wish they'd get on with it and kill each other, which is exactly the opposite of what Homer intended. Julie Christie appears very briefly as Achilles' mother, the nymph Thetis, and her radiance warms up the movie for just a few minutes (although it stretches credulity that the point-and-grunt Achilles could have sprung from the flesh of anyone so luminously expressive). Elsewhere, Cox's Agamemnon swans around in the kind of crazy-colored vestments favored by overweight middle-aged fiber artists, leaving half-chewed crumbs of scenery in his wake. At one point a character scolds, "You can't have the whole world, Agamemnon. It's too big -- even for you." But Cox gnaws so relentlessly at everything around him, you're sure he could nibble it down to size in no time.

Next Page: The great Peter O'Toole kneeling before the unworthy Brad Pitt?

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