Rhodes

Watching this bloated British colonial epic, I was reminded, oddly enough, of the Huey Lewis & the News song "Bad Is Bad." Specifically, the following lyric: "all you can eat for a dollar ninety-nine...but one dollar's worth was all that I could stand...." Huey was generous; by contrast, I was only able to stomach a little over an hour of Rhodes, slated to air on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre in January. The story of Cecil Rhodes, who made his fortune by seizing a good portion of Africa during the 'heart of darkness' days of the final quarter of the 19th-century, the film opens in 1899 and is told in flashback from the point of view of the adult Rhodes (Martin Shaw), prodded on by the wily Princess Catherine Radziwill (Frances Barber, sporting an atrocious Russian accent). In the opening hour, we are sent back to South Africa in the 1870s, where the young idealistic Rhodes (played by Joe Shaw) takes up the white man's burden (the lucrative job of exploitation), mining for diamonds and dabbling in local politics. I'm not sure what most irked me about Rhodes: the pedantic script, alleviated by predictable action sequences; the over-emotive acting (gentlemen, please, this is film, not the British stage--I am not sitting in the back row); or the extremely annoying tendency of the production to goose the audience every two minutes with an orchestral blast. Of course, the production (15 million dollars worth) is handsome, and I did miss the last five hours, so I'll kick in an extra half-star just in case it improved. A very optional purchase. Aud: P. (R. Pitman)