This story had all the elements that should make a movie attractive... action, intrigue, romance, a little suspense... but it was wasted on this film. The production was uneven, hopping from one seemingly unrelated scene to another, many of them making our leading lady appear at best adolescent and at worst delusional. The music was not well chosen for the action, and the directing was obvious (thunder crashes as Esther delivers what was supposed to be a dramatic line). The acting was mostly disappointing, with fine performances by John Rhys-Davies, Omar Sharif and a few others, but pretty amateur efforts from the rest of the cast. In all, the only thing I really enjoyed were the period costumes.

It was difficult to determine what ax was being ground at any particular moment of this film.

At times it seemed to prophecise the current state of affairs in the Middle East, at others it was a teeny whimsy which foretold the origin of the stereotype "Jewish Princess". There is much invective directed towards the "Greeks" and their alleged attempts at imperialistic democratization, there is no attempt to correlate Greek history with Biblical narrative. If this is am attempt to provoke thought, it can only lead one to wonder how the Hellenes escaped the Holocaust.

In all, the film smacked of the type of inference from scripture which is promulgated on "Christian" network tele-travesties.

Peter O'Toole was wasted in a farcical cameo as Samuel in the opening retrospective. I was saddened to see this monumental actor reduced to a couple of lines and a shake of a saber. It only added insult to the historic lack of recognition this great man of stage and screen has received from the film industry.

Omar Sharif, at least had a role with scenes throughout this boring spectacle. But, he and O'Toole were not utilized to elevate the film above the over-funded sophomoric babble of the script.

Throughout the 124-minutes of this feature I kept wishing that Sarah Silverman had been cast in the lead. An outright O.T. farce, on the order of "The Life of Brian"(I know, a N.T. farce) would have been extremely entertaining. As it is, "One Night..." seemed to drag on like an Arctic Winter. Nothing was illuminated.

Along with the closely-related classical epic, the Biblical epic seemed to have come to an end in the 1960s with John Huston's "The Bible", although there have been occasional attempts at a revival. The 1980s Richard Gere "King David" was a rare example from the latter decades of the 20th century, but there have been a few more in the opening decades of the 21st, including Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" and Ridley Scott's "Exodus: Gods and Kings" based upon the story of Moses, famously filmed by Cecil B. de Mille as "The Ten Commandments".

"One Night with the King" from 2006 is another relatively recent example of the genre. It is based upon the Book of Esther, earlier filmed as "Esther and the King" from 1960 with a young Joan Collins as the heroine. Unlike most Biblical epics, this one was produced by an explicitly Christian company, Gener8Xion Entertainment. (Yes, that's how they spell it. Don't ask me how they pronounce it).

The film generally follows the Biblical story of Esther, a beautiful young Jewish girl who married King Ahasuerus of Persia and who foiled a plot by the King's evil adviser Haman to massacre all Persian Jews. The historical accuracy of the Biblical account is debated. No other source mentions a Queen Esther of Persia, and the wife of King Xerxes I, generally believed to have been the model for Ahasuerus, was named Amestris. One or two details in the film do not match the Bible story. For example, the Bible does not say that Esther's real name was Hadassah (as it is here) and does not give any motive for Haman's villainy; here he is said to be a descendant of the last king of the Amalekites, a tribe wiped out by the Jews in the days of Saul. These details, however, are not inventions of the scriptwriters but are found in Jewish tradition.

What is an invention of the scriptwriters is the attempt to tie the story of Esther into modern concerns. Haman and his supporters, with their balcony oratory, torchlight parades, red flags and swastika-like symbol, are quite explicitly made out to be proto-Nazis. The story is set at a time when the king- referred to here as Xerxes rather than Ahasuerus- is considering going to war with Greece, and Haman argues that the Jews are a potential pro-Greek Fifth Column because they share the Greek belief in democracy. (In fact, ancient Israel was more of a theocracy than a democracy, and the Jews would have been repelled by the polytheistic nature of ancient Greek religion). In the Biblical version, Esther's predecessor as Queen, Vashti, is divorced by her husband because she refuses his command "to show the people and the princes her beauty. (In "Esther and the King" she is guilty of the opposite offence, that of showing more of her beauty than she ought to by stripping down to her panties in the Royal Hall). Here, however, Vashti's refusal to appear has nothing to do with her beauty, but is a one-woman pacifist protest against the king's warlike policy.

The film is visually attractive, with elaborately designed sets and costumes, but the script is overlong, tedious and at times difficult to follow. The best acting contribution comes from Luke Goss (better known as a pop star with the boy-band Bros) as Xerxes, portrayed here as a rather weak, nervous young man, insecure in his position as King (which he has only recently inherited from his father) and consequently over-reliant upon corrupt or self-seeking advisers. None of the rest of the cast make much of an impression, including Tiffany Dupont as the heroine, James Callis as the villainous Haman and the film's two ageing big-name stars Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif, both in minor roles.

The Biblical epic can be a difficult genre to get right. If it tries to depart from the Biblical account too radically it can end up looking eccentric, a trap which "Noah" partly fell into. Probably the best of the modern Biblical epics was "Exodus: Gods and Kings", and even this suffers in comparison with de Mille's masterpiece. "One Night with the King", however, falls into the opposite trap altogether, that of solemnity and over-reverence. It also fails to tackle one obvious issue arising from its story, namely the moral equivalence between Haman's planned massacre of the Jews and the Jews' massacre of his Amalekite ancestors. To explore such questions too deeply, however, would not go down well with the fundamentalist believers who make up a large part of the market for films like this. 4/10