Wednesday 12 January 2011

CENTURION - film review

I never got around to seeing this movie at the cinema but watched it last night on DVD so thought that was a perfect opportunity to scribble (I mean type but scribble sounds a bit more fun doesn’t it?) down a review.

Set in AD 117 the Picts have developed Guerrilla warfare to battle the invading Roman army, picking off outposts here and there. Centurion Quintas Dias (Michael Fassbender) is captured after one raid and taken back to the Picts king. The Ninth Legion are despatched with a Mute guide Etain (Olga Kurylenko), to destroy the Picts but before they can do so they rescue Dias who has escaped and are then massacred (after being betrayed by Etain)apart from Dias and a few others. The General of the Ninth, Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West) is captured and returned to the Picts for torture. The remaining Romans attempt a rescue of the General but fail and in the escape the Pict King’s son is murdered. In rage the King sends Etain and a party after the Romans with instructions to bring back their heads.

Neil Marshall’s fourth feature film has both the best cast he’s ever had and ironically this is also his weakest movie to date. His first, Dog Soldiers was a terrific low budget comedy horror with werewolves. His second, The Descent, was a scary, nasty and very gory affair and was quite brilliant. His third was the sadly much maligned (at least critically) Doomsday, which was highly derivative of Mad Max and 28 Days Later but was also bloody good fun. This film is bigger, but messier.

What I have described, briefly, above is pretty much what happens in the first thirty minutes of the movie. I’m all for a film moving fast but this is almost too fast and the film constantly feels as though someone in the editing suite has sacrificed any story or character scenes just to get to the next chase bit. This is where the film falls down for me. It’s just too messy. Also for me I thought the structure of the film could have been a little different, having the mission of the Ninth Legion forming the main crux of the plot and only kicking in with the chase/hunt element of the story for a terrific and pacey final thirty minutes or so. This way we could have built up some characters that the audience might have given a shit about rather than having the, admittedly well played by the actors, caricatures on show. For instance, Dias is the son of a Gladiator who was taught how to fight by his father (Good Grief) but chooses not to show any fighting prowess until quite late in the film. By rocketing through what plot there was in the first thirty minutes or thereabouts we suddenly find ourselves with a lot of screen time to pad out and the breakneck speed of the film comes crashing to a halt for a while, where we are subjected to numerous shots of men running and people giving chase on horseback.

This is a big shame as the film has some quite beautifully cinematography of the Scottish countryside and everything looks all nice and muddy and bloody. Dominic West has a ball as the General and is probably the most entertaining character on show. Olga Kurylenko’s role of the mute warrior woman Etain is also pretty impressive as she throws herself fully into a difficult role as a mute savage, but she is all wrath and fury and suits the role very well. Fassbender is okay but he’s pretty much playing the role as “the upper class British Officer”, or at least that’s how he sounds. He looks okay in the action but he’s been better. Noel Clarke is wasted in a role anyone could have played and Liam Cunningham and David Morrissey are very good in fairly thankless roles.

The saving grace for this film is the action. Neil Marshall has proved on his previous movies that he can do action and this does not disappoint at all. Considering this film is a 15 there is a hell of a lot of gore on show. Head are hacked off in bloody gouts of crimson, limbs sliced off, faces impaled with spears and arrows. There’s even a moment when a Roman is taking a leak and he is impaled with a wooden stake right in his genitals. All the battle scenes are full of blood and guts and it’s terrific. There were quite a few moments where I was exclaiming “Jesus” and “Fuuuuuuuuuck”. You know it’s good when I’m making comments like that when I’m watching.

To be fair this is a pretty ordinary film that’s well filmed but not very well put together in the final edit, the actors are generally all good in underwritten roles but the film is elevated from ‘waste of time’ to ‘well worth a rent’ due to buckets of gory violence. Fingers crossed that Neil Marshall’s next movie is far stronger affair.

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