i think i can say with 100% conviction that this is the worst piece of dog shit media i’ve ever had the misery of enduring.

this felt like a 134-minute long relentless assault on my brain, so much was going wrong that i couldn’t compute it all at once. even if i could bring myself to ignore the racism, the “prayer” in the opening scene, and the white savior narrative bullshit, this was legitimately terrible. charles gordon drones on and on about his love for sudan with all the enthusiasm of a decaying carcass. al-mahdi is supposed to embody a charismatic cult-leader type, but he does nothing besides address hordes of nameless brain-dead followers as his “beloveds” in a completely made-up accent. his speeches are all variations of the only sentence he can seem to think of: “i am the mahdi, the chosen one.” lawrence oliver’s acting, if you can even call it that, is so grotesque that he almost invented a new genre of minstrel show.

then there’s the dialogue. stupid. at one point, charles gordon declares that he “taught the natives that they had rights.” 20 minutes or so later, he tells al-mahdi about how sudan was “sick and abused” before he brought it peace. he says he cannot “leave it to the sickness and misery” in which he once found it. al-mahdi’s response? you guessed it. “But I am the Mahdi, the Expected One.” guys… verbatim. i almost laughed.

the pacing was excruciating, i was fighting to keep going by the 30 minute mark. i tried watching it in 1.25 speed for a while, but somehow it managed to feel even slower. everyone was one-dimensional. everything was stupid and racist and boring. i refuse to think of better words to describe this train wreck. save yourself the agony, this movie is ass.

i think i can say with 100% conviction that this is the worst piece of dog shit media i’ve ever had the misery of enduring.

this felt like a 134-minute long relentless assault on my brain, so much was going wrong that i couldn’t compute it all at once. even if i could bring myself to ignore the racism, the “prayer” in the opening scene, and the white savior narrative bullshit, this was legitimately terrible. charles gordon drones on and on about his love for sudan with all the enthusiasm of a decaying carcass. al-mahdi is supposed to embody a charismatic cult-leader type, but he does nothing besides address hordes of nameless brain-dead followers as his “beloveds” in a completely made-up accent. his speeches are all variations of the only sentence he can seem to think of: “i am the mahdi, the chosen one.” lawrence oliver’s acting, if you can even call it that, is so grotesque that he almost invented a new genre of minstrel show.

then there’s the dialogue. stupid. at one point, charles gordon declares that he “taught the natives that they had rights.” 20 minutes or so later, he tells al-mahdi about how sudan was “sick and abused” before he brought it peace. he says he cannot “leave it to the sickness and misery” in which he once found it. al-mahdi’s response? you guessed it. “But I am the Mahdi, the Expected One.” guys… verbatim. i almost laughed.

the pacing was excruciating, i was fighting to keep going by the 30 minute mark. i tried watching it in 1.25 speed for a while, but somehow it managed to feel even slower. everyone was one-dimensional. everything was stupid and racist and boring. i refuse to think of better words to describe this train wreck. save yourself the agony, this movie is ass.