“Well, Yahweh’s a bit of a dick,” remarked my companion as we exited a deserted showing of Exodus: Gods and Kings. So, apparently, is Ridley Scott, for making an extremely dull, CGI-swamped account of the Israelites’ trials and triumphs in Egypt. All I really wanted was an entertaining cross between Gladiator and The Prince of Egypt.

Instead, I sat through a torturous two and a half hours of Christian Bale alternating his facial expressions between ‘mildly annoyed’ and ‘quite annoyed’. The film has courted controversy with its decision to cast white leads, straying from the Biblical text, and Bale describing Moses as ‘schizophrenic’. Its greatest sin, however, is surely in managing to make boring one of the great epics of the ancient world.

The film chooses to focus on the decidedly un-Biblical relationship between Moses (Bale) and his adoptive brother, Rameses (Joel Edgerton), who eventually becomes Pharaoh.

Edgerton is aided in his performance neither by the frequently appalling script (“From an economic standpoint alone, what you’re asking is problematic to say the least”), or by an erotic moment with a snake, but even so must take some responsibility for his droning dictator.

As Moses transforms from prince to outcast to prophet, we encounter little empathetic dialogue and instead become mired in cinematic tropes; heavy-handed foreshadowing occurs when Moses berates the de facto Jewish leader, Nun (a pleasing turn from Ben Kingsley), such as when he insists that he doesn’t believe in prophecies and questions why the Jewish God has failed to help the Israelites.

On the back of some imaginative biblical translation (1 Kings 19:12, “a still small voice”), God’s avatar is a young (white) boy, who appears alongside the burning bush and addresses Moses (who, in moment of unintended hilarity, is all but totally submerged in mud).

This scene is an example of one of the many tropes the film grasps at: the eery supernatural child, à la Sixth Sense. The intended symbolism is meant to be that of truth and innocence, coupled with a child’s ability to be merciless and cruel. Yet the shock value of the child quickly fades, and the audience is left with a slight annoyance at a petulant and whiny God.

The plagues, richly described and escalating in the original text, translate powerfully to screen; the flies swarm nauseatingly in 3D, the fish rot in blood and hail thunders impressively from the sky. Let’s get one thing straight, however: no matter how many pixels and hours of digital rendering you pour into it, a plague of frogs is still just a lot of frogs.

Alberto Iglesias’ score should also be singled out for special ridicule. It is unbelievable that a man who has been nominated for a total of three Oscars in his lifetime could have penned this monotonous wall of sound.

If the foundation-shaking booms sparingly deployed in Inception had been looped continuously, much the same effect would have been achieved. Presumably the idea was a soundtrack suitable for endless panning shots of digitised battles and cities; the back catalogue of the Spice Girls would have been less egregious.

Frustratingly, there were actually a couple of intriguing concepts. Yet, in a fashion that one quickly comes to expect from this film, they were always underdeveloped.

Before the plagues, Moses, with his new background as a brilliant military tactician, begins a campaign of guerrilla warfare (after a training montage with wannabe zealots). For a minute, there was the hint of fertile moral exploration of ‘an eye for an eye’ and allusions to the modern conflicts and martyrdom that dominate the Middle East today – alas, Yahweh soon waded in and did his thing.

There was also the suggestion that Moses hallucinated his conversations with God; modern theologians have occasionally presented similar theories about the prophet Ezekiel. Rather than delving into psychoanalysis, Exodus was content to leave the question hanging, in the hope of mysteriousness. Serious scenes of Moses talking to a lump of rock became inadvertently humorous (especially when thought of as a deleted scene from American Psycho).

The film ends a little like Return of the King, in that the ending seems to be pushed back ad nauseam. The final scene shows an ancient Moses guarding the ark with tablets safe inside; unfortunately, giggles gripped what remained of the audience as Bale, when aged to 120, looked like an unholy cross between a Ringwraith and Jimmy Saville.