2009 plodding action movie
Rating: 14/20
Plot: A mute, one-eyed warrior and a little kid travel with some Crusaders after the former escapes from slavery.
I've only seen Bronson from Nicolas Winding Refn. I loved that one enough to have this on my "To See" list. For several years. It's a unique movie, especially unique as an action fantasy movie. There has to be somewhere around 100 lines of dialogue in the entire movie with the protagonist, played by Mads Mikkelsen who was the bad guy in Casino Royale, not speaking at all. There are stretches of movie where nothing at all seems to be happening, and other scenes start to feel completely redundant. The landscape, although starkly beautiful and haunting, starts to lose its allure after a while. So I'm not sure this is a film that is going to end up being memorable.
It does stun while you're watching though. It's just a different sort of movie experience. There are blood spurts, piked heads, a nifty disemboweling. The soundtrack is abstract, the sort of perfect tones to accompany this sort of plotless journey. It's also very heavy on the sound effects--lots of squelching during violent moments and creakings and shufflings during quieter ones. It makes the hero's lugubriously-paced journey a sonic experience as well as a visual one.
Be warned though--this thing really is sluggishly paced, and despite the violence, I think a lot of people will be bored by something like this. It's one of those one-toned films more about pacing and atmosphere than in telling a good story, the filthy landscape being almost as much of a character as any of the actual characters in this. In fact, the characters are so flat that this feels more like allegory. I'm not schooled on Norse mythology enough to understand any connections made there, and I'm not quite sure what this was saying about any clash between those old beliefs and Christianity. That adds another layer for viewers smarter than I am.
One question for any linguists out there--was the f-word even around in 1,000 AD?
You know what? I type these blog posts on a computer. I guess I can look that up.
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