Exodus: Gods and Kings is intent on giving you a story that I imagine 20th Century Fox's marketing department describing as "not your father's Old Testament." Christian Bale's Moses opens the film as a capable young man, a great strategist and adviser to the pharaoh, the kind of badass who fights muggers and assassins two at a time and easily wins. If motorcycles had been invented in ancient Egypt, you bet your ass this Moses would be showboating around on one. But as the movie drags on, and as Moses is cast out by the evil Ramses (Joel Edgerton), Bale loses his footing. For a while, he seems to be playing a different character in every scene; his accent varies depending on who he's talking to. Once Moses finally encounters God, portrayed in Exodus as an 11-year-old boy—kind of a funny idea that's not played for laughs at all—Bale digs into the role a little more. He turns Moses into a muttering freak who seems to be crazy, which is right up Bale's alley. Unfortunately, since God doesn't show up till something like 50 minutes in, it's too late to save the movie.

With Exodus, Ridley Scott is trying to produce one of those goofy old-style Hollywood biblical epics. He nailed the goofy part, at least. The acting ranges from occasionally okay (Bale) to I-just-showed-up-for-the-paycheck (Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley) to woefully miscast (poor Aaron Paul has almost no dialogue as Moses's sidekick, Joshua, presumably because every time he opens his mouth, he sounds like, well, a meth dealer) to outright ridiculous (John Turturro as Pharaoh Seti). The villain of the piece, Edgerton's Ramses, is an inept buffoon who can't do one competent thing for the whole movie. When he's waving a dead baby around as a prop in multiple scenes, you could be forgiven for wondering if Edgerton is shooting for camp with his performance. It's more likely he's just an actor adrift in a bad role, trying to emote with whatever winds up in his hands (dead baby or no).

Exodus is getting slammed from all sides: Liberals complain that the film's Egyptian cast of characters has been hopelessly whitewashed (true), and evangelicals grouse that the treatment of the biblical subject matter lacks piety. If Exodus were a decent film, those topics might be worth discussion. But it isn't, so they're not. I'm okay with tabling the conversation for some future date with the release of another, worthier film.

There's really only about 20 minutes out of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime when Exodus comes alive: Toward the end, the plagues are rolled out in a very long, gonzo montage of special effects. People catch on fire, they're attacked by tiny animals, their faces erupt in boils, and civilization starts to fall apart. The sequence is in no way worth the price of admission, but it at least perks things up and reminds us what the movie could have been, if it had a pulse and a brain. (The climactic parting of the Red Sea, though, is bloodless and tension-free, which is a real letdown.) What does it say about modern biblical adaptations like Exodus and Darren Aronofsky's much better, though still deathly flawed, Noah that the most interesting part of them comes in the special effects?