I NEVER got around to seeing the original version, the reviews of which didn't have me wallowing in a pool of regret for missing out.

Oliver Stone apparently took a lot of the criticism on board and he re-edited the whole thing, but short of tearing up the script there's little he could have done to improve it.

Colin Farrell's Alexander, Angelina Jolie's Olympias (his shifty mum) and Val Kilmer's Philip (his one-eyed daddy) are forced to ham it up from a cliche-ridden script as Stone's epic lurches from cheesy speech to totally overblown set piece with horrible ease.

Some of the battles are fine but the whole thing comes together like a mess of disjointed ideas.