By Chris Hewitt

St. Paul Pioneer Press

Batman leads his people to the promised land in “Exodus: Gods and Kings.”

The superhero vibe is not just because Moses is played by the movies’ most recent Batman, Christian Bale. It’s also that Moses has been given the go-to superhero psychological profile, in which it’s revealed that the conflicted do-gooder is troubled by the enormous powers and responsibilities that have been handed to him. As a result, this “Exodus” feels both familiar and oddly impersonal, as if Moses has been slotted into a role that any number of other heroes could have filled just as easily.

As much as possible, the four credited screenwriters and director Ridley Scott seem to be trying to get at what it must have felt like for Moses to be, essentially, burdened with freeing and saving the Jewish people. We see his initial skepticism, his capitulation after a series of miracles (although the response to the miracles is weirdly muted) and his training of an enormous army. Meanwhile, we’re also shown what his heroism costs him in both his severed relationship with Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses, who was raised as his brother, and in time spent away from his own young family.

Enough about that, though. What viewers probably want to know is: How about the parting of the Red Sea? Is it spectacular? No, unfortunately. Scott tries to split the difference between a scientific explanation for the parting (freak thunderstorms and tides) and big special effects, with unimpressive results. Yeah, the Red Sea parting in “The Ten Commandments” was kinda cheesy but it was also a lot more fun than the drably brown sea bed we’re shown here.

Scott does bring out the big guns for the plagues that are visited on Egypt: some gory, bloody-thirsty crocodiles, locusts that turn day into night, so on. It’s in those scenes that “Exodus: Gods and Kings” comes alive but, the rest of the time, this great story feels pinched and dull, which is not a good look for a movie this long.

While Moses and the surprisingly colorless Ramses (Joel Edgerton) are yammering away, there’s plenty of time for us to be distracted with questions that take us right out of the movie: What’s with the array of accents being used by the international cast of Egyptians (in addition to Bale and Edgerton, there’s Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, Indira Varma and John Turturro, none of whom has a single vowel sound in common with the others). And, what with all the locusts and frogs raining down on them, when do these “Egyptians” have the time to put on the elaborately ridiculous eye make-up that is meant to mark them as selfish wastrels?

Much has been made of Scott’s decision to cast mostly white actors as Egyptians and it is true that this “Exodus” doesn’t seem very interested in moving beyond stereotypes (the one concession to Ramses’ humanity is that he loves his baby son). But it probably wouldn’t matter who was playing this movie’s versions of these characters, because they’re just not that interesting.