The New Ben-Hur Remake Loses the Chariot Race

by Bruce Chadwick

Bruce Chadwick lectures on history and film at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News. Mr. Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.

Why does Hollywood insist on remaking movies that were perfectly fine when they debuted and have stood the test of time? Now it is the venerable Ben-Hur. The 1959 epic didn’t win enough Oscars (a record, at the time, eleven)? Its star did not do a good job (Charlton Heston, as Ben-Hur, won Best Actor in 1960)? It did not earn enough money (second highest grossing picture ever through 1959)? It has not been shown on television enough (a gazillion times)?

Now moviedom has remade Ben Hur. There have been some enormous changes in the movie, that opened last week. It is now just two hours and twenty minutes compared to the 1959 version’s nearly four hours. This time, Judah Ben-Hur does not save a Roman General in the sea battle and is not subsequently taken under his wing. Here, Messala is not his boyhood friend but adopted brother. Jesus did not appear in the 1959 film but is in this version. He appears more like an internet technician than the Son of God. Does Jesus (played flatly by Rodrigo Santoro) inspire the world? All of human history? No. This Jesus could not get people to come into a church out of a rainstorm. Morgan Freeman is in the movie as the guy who taught Ben-Hur how to drive chariots. He prattles around like he is trying to find himself another detective Alex Cross adventure. Freeman is in it because it is in the U.S. Constitution that Freeman has to appear in all American movies (it’s in the clause right after the Presidential term limits).

And then there is the legendary chariot race.

The original, which was set in Rome, took about ten minutes and was full of high voltage human drama as well as plenty of magnificently photographed spills and thrills. The one in the 2016 remake is just a bunch of chariots riding around in circles creating a lot of dust. Ben-Hur whirls around and Messala whirls around and Ben-Hur whirls around a little better. No big deal at all, a really a boring race. Watch the Kentucky Derby.

The remake seems more like a weak episode of Games of Thrones, without any naked women, than a classic movie. Where is the powerful music? The deep religion of the original? The heroism of Ben-Hur in the sea battle? The leper colony? The dramatic orations of Heston? The solemn scenes with Jesus (whom you never actually see)?

This is the fifth remake of the 1880 novel by Lew Wallace and none of them approach the 1959 classic.

Everybody knows the plot. Rich and powerful Jewish prince Ben-Hur, who lives in Jerusalem with his family, is falsely blamed for an attack on Roman official Pontius Pilot and is cast off into the Roman fleet as a galley slave. He suffers rowing in the dreadful underbelly of a ship for five years, gets freed in a sea battle when his ship is rammed, stumbles into Morgan Freeman, and seeks revenge against old buddy Messala, now a powerful Roman in the army. They meet in the chariot race, which symbolizes the struggle between the two men and between the always sneering Romans and the hard-working, erstwhile Jews. Jesus pops up in the middle of all this, boring everybody, and Ben-Hur accidentally becomes part of his story.

The remake is not all bad. The one thing the remake does right is portray the Romans as far, far more brutal than the 1959 movie did. That film was made in the middle of the “sword and sandals” Biblical era adventure films and the Romans always looked pretty good in them. They were powerful but benevolent, well intentioned if wrong-headed and each wore 800 pounds of armor. Here, in the remake, they are unjust, slovenly brutes who butcher the Jews for no better reason than to show the populace who is the boss and to have some vicious fun (you cannot miss the Nazi comparisons here). The director, Timur Bekmambetov, a Russian, does a fine job of showing just why Rome was able to rule the world and everybody in the Middle East – everywhere – feared them. The Roman Empire, with its provinces like the Middle East and its provincial armies, is explained well and viewers get a good sense of ancient history.

Another thing the director did right was expand the roles of the women in the film. The women in the 1959 version were mere stick figures, but here they play a more important part and certainly give you a broader view of the people of Jerusalem. Heston’s ‘50s film kept them in the background.

The main failure of the movie is the casting of Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire co-star) as Judah Ben-Hur. He has to play Judah and he has to play Charleton Heston, too, and that’s nigh impossible. Heston had the swagger of both the Prince of the Jews and the lordly Roman protégée of the general whose life he saved. Heston, best known as filmdom’s best Moses ever, gave gravitas and real emotional depth to his character. He was the man. Jack Huston drifts through the movie like an encyclopedia salesman and looks like the puny weakling in all those muscle magazine ads. He needs a shave, too. There is no powerful persona to his personality. Heston in the chariot race looked as heroic as heroic gets. Huston just hangs on to his chariot for dear life. Toby Kebbell, as Messala, is just as bad. He is a tough guy soldier who punishes Ben-Hur over politics. He is a thug and struts around like Al Capone in a toga. The others in the cast struggle through the tepid screenplay written by John Ridley and Keith C. Clarke.

The shortening of the movie hurts, too. Even though the 1959 version was nearly four hours, it did give you a lot of time to get into all of the characters and subplots. The new version takes too many shortcuts. It is a Reader’s Digest Ben-Hur.

This is one chariot race that Judah Ben-Hur lost. Catch the original movie on late night television. It soars.