Remakes are there to retell the same story but often try to modernize it for people who haven’t seen the original. But who wanted to see a remake of the classic Oscar-winning 1959 epic, Ben-Hur?No one.
It tells the tale of two brothers but eventually become enemies as one is a Jew and the latter joins the Roman Empire. As he was sold into slavery, Judah Ben-Hur seeks out vengeance to kill this adopted brother.
Right from the start, the trailers for this were abysmal leaving no excitement whatsoever as it looks choppy and fake altogether. Hot take: those trailers were worse than the Ghostbusters trailers. Not just that, but it’s a movie nobody asked for in the first place, So it’s no surprise that Ben-Hur was terrible. The story isn’t interesting in the slightest besides the fact it’s been done before, it offers nothing new.
To be honest, Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire) wasn’t that bad as Judah Ben-Hur. He gave a well-balanced performance. Toby Kebbell didn’t really give a good performance as Messala. When the progress of the film, he didn’t really do anything competent overall. And at this point, you can see Morgan Freeman not giving a crap, especially while wearing dreadlocks, which is laughable. Plus he also narrates because why not? Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted)’s direction was terrible as the action scenes were poorly handled as it was sometimes a bit shaky and most of the time it involves the annoyance of hand-handled cams. Along the directing, the editing was dumb and the CGI felt weak in the process.
The biggest thing that should’ve been exciting was the famous chariot race. But even that whole sequences was dealt with bad directing and no energy put into it. But what really draws this into being bad is the ending. Because it took “that” message to a new low as it doesn’t make sense after what has been happening in the past two hours. And it runtime felt longer compared to the original as it was over three hours long. If this was trying to appeal to the Christian audience, it failed to do so. It didn’t drive on having any emotional appeal to this making it just feels bland throughout with no real fun to be shown. As for a historical epic, it goes right along with Exodus: God and Kings and 300: Rise of an Empire as it’s considered a dud. At this time of age, we’re being bombarded with remakes that are unnecessary and this is a prime example of that case.
Ben-Hur is a poorly unnecessary remake that wasn’t emotional and just had uninspiring action sequences to justify why it exists.
Grade: D+
DC's Take 