To make matters even worse, Aronofsky decided to cast three of Hollywood’s very
worst actors to portray the younger leads – Emma Watson, Logan Lerman and the abominable
Douglas Booth – each of them outdoing the other in a game of ‘how shit can I
act?’. Furthermore, to really add salt to the wound, Jennifer Connelly and Ray
Winstone, usually upstanding actors, give the most sub-par performances of
their careers, leaving only butch Kiwi Russell Crowe to pick up the slack and
actually deliver some punch to his lines.
The whole film is a mess; a wet, sloppy behemoth which can’t
deliver a decent plot beneath the weight of its financial and critical
expectations. The saving grace is some particularly nifty CGI to create the
rock-formation fallen angels which help Noah build the ark, as well as a couple
of sleek sequences which see animals boarding the ark, and also the story of
Adam and Eve in Eden, but other than that, it’s just two hours of seemingly bad
dramatics - and Ray Winstone’s cockney villain is so hopelessly superfluous to
the already diluted and mediocre plot that the only suggestion as to his
presence is merely to fulfil the ‘screenwriting criteria’ of having a villain. Noah could have been an amazing
retelling, an epic for not only the Christian audience, but also for the
general popcorn crowd, but instead, it fell very flat. There’s only so much cockney
villainy, amateur drama and hammy dialogue one can actually handle. [2/5]
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