If the sword wielding, blood-letting image above doesn't look like your idea of Moses, you have the same reaction as me. This week I saw the new movie, "Exodus: Gods and Kings," staring Joel Edgerton as Ramses the Pharaoh and Christian Bale as Moses. The Bible describes Moses as a humble, stuttering, God-fearing man. Bale's Moses is anything but that. He's violent, moody, uncertain, confused, and a bit bipolar. His brother Aaron, Moses' mouthpiece in Scripture, says nothing in the movie until a couple of lines at the end, hanging back as his brother bumbles his way toward a confrontation with Egypt's ruler. God is an irritable, 11-year-old boy speaking in distorted logic and riddles. If you thought that Russell Crowe's Noah was an unbiblical film (To read my review about that movie, CLICK HERE for the blog, "Noah's Nonsense, April 2, 2014), "Exodus" is a lot worse with an overdose of carnage and action-chase sequences.

Moses carries a sharp sword, not a staff.  He chisels the Ten Commandments on stone, instead of God's finger doing the job. Actually, we never are told what's on the stone. Perhaps reciting the Decalogue would be too uncomfortable for today's movie audiences to hear . . .  all those thou shalt nots regarding taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain, committing adultery, killing, stealing, and coveting thy neighbor's wife etc. The puerile, bratty, obnoxious excuse for God almost makes one wish for a return of George Burns in the role. Waterspouts part the Red Sea, not the Lord. Gorging on human flesh by oversized crocodiles turns the Nile red. Moses' sister Miriam is a fearful, mendacious woman, not a prophetess of praise. Moses isn't setting his people free as an 80-year-old but as an ab-tight, swashbuckling 30-something. You get the idea.

This is a Moses for our tolerant age. Short of substance but long on style. I went because it's my job to check out what the devil is doing. Now you know, so you can save the price of a ticket. Perhaps we should have expected what we got when Bale, in a pre-release interview, called his character Moses "schizophrenic" and "barbaric." At the end of the movie, with white letters on a black screen, director Ridley Scott, a self-proclaimed agnostic, dedicates the film to his brother Tony. If that name doesn't ring a bell, he's the sibling who, on August 19, 2012, jumped to his death from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles. Perhaps that's why the director of "Exodus" seems so intent on demeaning God. Is it is his own anger, hurt, and confusion coming through? Or is it just a movie?