‘Mongol’ | 2 stars
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
“Mongol” (opening today at the Tivoli) has the visual sweep and epic ambitions of a David Lean masterwork.
If only somebody were home.
Russian Sergei Bodrov directed this sumptuously produced adventure, the first in a planned trilogy examining the life of Genghis Khan. Eight hundred years ago Khan united the Mongol hordes and created an empire to rival that of Alexander the Great. Clearly, this was a powerful and charismatic individual.
Not that you’d know it from the movie, an impressively mounted but dramatically inert melodrama inexplicably nominated this year for the foreign language Oscar.
Concentrating on the great warrior’s first 30 years, “Mongol” follows the future Genghis Khan — as a youth he was known as Temudgin — from childhood through an adversity-filled adolescence and young manhood.
The son of a khan, or tribal chieftain, 9-year-old Temudgin is cast adrift when his father is murdered and he becomes the slave of the vengeful new khan. The boy spends several years as a beast of burden, a heavy wooden yoke locked around his neck.
The fully grown Temudgin (now portrayed by Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano) breaks free and finds Borte (Khulan Chuluun), the girl to whom he was betrothed years earlier. They have just enough time to marry and enjoy an idyllic honeymoon on the steppes before he is seriously wounded and she’s abducted by a rival clan.
Joining forces with his boyhood friend Jamukha (Honglei Sun), who now heads his own tribe, Temudgin plans a raid to free Borte.
All this is told in flashback as Temudgin endures yet another captivity, this time at the hands of a ruler who keeps him in a cage, a human zoo animal and an object of curiosity by the citizenry.
Bodrov and screenwriter Arif Aliyev’s approach to their subject is borderline reverential, reducing Temudgin to a personality-less protagonist destined for greatness. Trouble is, it’s hard to imagine greatness coming to so colorless an individual. Asano gives no suggestion of who this guy is (Chuluun’s Borte is equally bland) or why millions would follow him.
The only real acting on display comes from Sun, whose Jamukha is a sardonic local chieftain bursting with idiosyncrasies and ironic humor. In a film filled with stultifying respect and stiff performances, he gives us a fleshed-out character. When Sun is on screen you realize what the rest of the film is missing.
Give “Mongol’s” makers credit for taking advantage of the spectacular scenery and creating an almost documentary reality regarding life among Mongolia’s nomads. But as storytelling the film goes nowhere slowly.
‘MONGOL’ ★★
Director: Sergei Bodrov
Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Khulan Chuluun, Honglei Sun
Rated: R for sequences of bloody warfare; Mongolian with subtitles
Running time: 2:06
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