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Oliver Stone has directed the most expensive camp movie ever made, entirely befitting the first mainstream flick with a gay action hero. Every one of Alexander’s 175 minutes wrenches both arch drama and cheeky wit from every frame, and if an old-fashioned 1950s sword-and-sandal epic with thinly veiled queer subtexts is what Stone was shooting for, then, ladies and gentlemen, are you in luck. Just don’t come to the theater expecting greatness.

Alexander opens with the great one’s death in Babylon, 323 B.C., and immediately Stone sets his lens to both high- and no-brow. From a bed an arm stretches skyward clutching a brilliant jeweled ring, which falls to the ground and lies still. It’s a grandiose nod to the granddaddy of all biopics and yet it feels both forced and wry, as if Stone were splitting the difference between Citizen Kane and Cleopatra out of the gate.

The story itself is told in flashback from an aged Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins, wearing Jon Voight’s skin) reciting the tales of brave Alexander to an attending scribe and a gaggle of well-oiled, half-naked manservants plucked of all excess body hair save that joining their eyebrows. Ptolemy is well equipped to recount Alexander’s tale; he served under the young king during his most formidable and legend-inspiring battles. Even wise old Ptolemy can’t decide if Alexander’s story is one for the ages or just a good yarn, though, and Hopkins’ measured voice dances through lines both stately and stultifying, like Dr. Lecter matching wine to a body part.

The young Alexander entered the world as the already troubled son to Philip (Val Kilmer, looking like he’s still playing Jim Morrison but having lost an eye after passing out on a bottle) and Olympias (Angelina Jolie, purring every line of dialogue like she’s channeling Julie Newmar’s Catwoman). Olympias claims bloodlines to Achilles, bows to the god Dionysus, and boasts that Alexander is the scion of Zeus rather than the scarred, wine-swilling husband who drunkenly bursts into her bedroom one evening and tries to force a little Macedonian booty call on her. Alexander the boy witnesses this near-rape and Dr. Freud rushes to the script room, stat.

Olympias babies the effeminate young Alexander (Connor Paolo), who wrestles with his peers in physical competition and intellectual jousting with their teacher Aristotle (Christopher Plummer). Philip thinks his son a mama’s boy until Alexander breaks a black stallion that becomes one of his lifelong mates, his trusty stead Buchephalus. His other lifelong constant, and the real fire of his loins, is his young friend Hephaistion, who matures into the lovely, long-haired Jared Leto, who wears more eyeliner than Jennifer Connelly in Requiem for a Dream and is just as pretty.

At this point you’ve been sitting long enough to notice, and Stone must realize he needs to get to, a golden-locked Colin Farrell—a now-adult Alexander, unleashing hell in a warrior skirt—and quick. For though a teenaged Alexander is exiled by his father and ascends to king after Philip is assassinated a few years later, Ptolemy rolls right into the battle that launched a thousand myths, with Farrell at the head. At Gaugamela in Persia, Alexander leads 40,000 against King Darius’ 200,000 Persians; he suffers heavy losses but captures Babylon, and victory’s taste only primes Alexander’s appetite.

Only not for the usual spoils. Alexander wants to unite a people and give the uncivilized Persians and Asians what they really want: education, a fair government, and the ability to live their lives as they choose. Alexander believes the children produced by interbreeding should be treated as empire citizens and entitled to the same education and training, which ruffles both compatriot and conquered. And while it’s tempting to suspect some contemporary political commentary into Alexander the Great Miscegenator as he looks out over the impressive F/X of ancient Middle Eastern cities in the background, such import evaporates in sets that look one Claymation mechanical owl shy of Clash of the Titans.

And so Alexander pushes east looking for the world’s end. It’s in one of these remote parts that he encounters Roxane (Rosario Dawson), and when a Persian general shares that ancient Babylonian aphorism “the man who loves with irony lives forever,” Alexander decides to make the “savage” his wife. She’s the spitting image of his mother—down to her serpent jewelry, which Stone’s camera captures just to make sure you get the point—and before Alexander and Roxane get down to a little slap-and-intimidate foreplay to conjugal consummation, Hephaistion gives Alexander the ring of his true love that the king clutches in his death throes.

And we’re only halfway to the finish line. We’ve still yet to hear Alexander dismiss his mother’s greed with “Her ransom is high for nine months residence in her womb.” We’ve yet to see the Vertigo visual of Angelina Jolie’s head surrounded Medusa-like by snakes, though we saw it coming about two hours back. And we’ve yet to dine on the baroque elephant battle in an Indian forest, where Alexander is shot by an arrow, knocking him off Buchephalus and off this quasi-serious movie, landing him in a Dario Argento psychological shriek as the entire screen washes magenta.

Alexander shows you nothing of what went on inside the man who came to rule most of the known world by age 30. But the Showgirls-esque drinking games that somebody conspires to accompany the DVD are going to be a hoot.

E-mail Bret McCabe