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As a movie, Hawaii isn't very good, but in a way it's great. While it's hard not to grow weary with its 161 minutes of leaden historical pageantry, especially as there's not a single interesting shot in the whole thing, it's equally difficult to not be amazed by its acid take on colonial arrogance--or by its lead, one the most astoundingly unsympathetic in Hollywood history. You can't help but wonder what comes next, even as the filmmakers botch the execution and you grow impatient for what's-next to show its tardy face. They're not naturals, but they're not hypocrites, either, and if all fusty quality pictures were like this I'd have considerably less to complain about.

The "hero" of this adaptation of a James A. Michener doorstop is the Rev. Abner Hale (a brilliantly befuddled Max von Sydow). He's a green Calvinist minister eager to save the natives of Hawaii--that is, to destroy their culture and traditions in favour of his own. Hale's the kind of guy who knows only what he thinks is on paper, a socially inept killjoy whose response to anything he can't immediately answer is "I'll pray on that." He's cruel to his charges and cruel to himself, and he's constantly perplexed that nobody wants to listen to his narrow views, making him a bizarre centre for the twilight-of-Old-Hollywood epic that Hawaii aspires to be. As Hale is thrown against the supremely laissez-faire Malama (Jocelyn LaGarde), the queen of his pocket of Hawaii, his arrogance seems at once intolerable and ridiculous.

Of course, this gives the movie the problem of how to salve the consciences of the people it's damning. It achieves this by occasionally giving lesser (but no less loathsome) characters some redemptive dialogue: whaling captain Rafer Hoxworth (Richard Harris) gets points for rejecting the Reverend's sexual asceticism in the face of his men taking advantage of Hawaiian women, while a couple of ministers loudly blow off the church only to get rich off of Hawaii's port lands. The whole production is confused in its attempt to play both sides of the street, that confusion showing up in the follow-through, which stares dumbly at the action while refusing visual comment. Anaesthetizing you for long passages, Hawaii threatens to collapse under its heavy load of bet-hedging.

But for every stretch of boring, David Lean-style epicism, there's a moment where you wonder if you're really watching a Hollywood film from 1966. Not only does Von Sydow's disappointed performance sell the horrible complexity of his theological nerd, but the discussion in the film is also way more provocative than you'd expect from something so expensive and dull. I can't remember the last recent commercial movie that got this far in over its head--and its braving of the rapids means that it's largely without precedent. I'm sorry to have to have the reservations that I do, because although the filmmaking is really pretty standard, there are times when you can't believe your ears; Hawaii gives the curious and left-wing something to chew on.

MGM's DVD presentation of Hawaii leaves room for improvement. The 2.35:1, 16x9-enhanced image falls down in the sharpness department, beset as it is by a slight blurriness that mars fine detail. Colours are likewise a little flat, though saturation is fairly good. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound, however, is surprisingly clear and potent, with the occasional punch low enough to register in the subwoofer. Extras include a vintage making-of (10 mins.) that's largely useless as information (bulletin: they had a costume designer) but is not without interest as a publicity time-capsule. The film's trailer rounds out the package.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover