by Ryan Lewellen
Lord Bartok (Morgan Freeman) has grown tired of paying unwarranted taxes (bribes) to the evil Minister Geza Mott (Aksel Hennie), and when he is further inconvenienced in being forced to pay Mott a visit, he starts flapping his jaw. Mott is furious, and attacks him, but when the two are discovered, and Bartok has taken the upper hand, he finds himself on trial for attempted murder of his malevolent superior. He has no way out. Ultimately fed up with Mott’s corruption, standing before the emperor (Peyman Moaadi), he speaks his mind and is found guilty of treason. Unfortunately for his best buddy, elite Commander Raiden (Clive Owen), that means he has to do the honors of decapitating his master in public. The Bartok lands are evacuated, its soldiers are scattered, and the disgraced Raiden has taken to drinking and philandering, but his former cohorts have been hatching a scheme to avenge their dead master. Will Raiden clean up his act and redeem himself?
This is a frustrating film. It’s attractive from head to toe. The costumes and sets are thoroughly conceived and creative enough to produce what appears to be an existing fantasy culture. Inspired by the dress and architecture from many nations and many eras, the multicultural cast looks very much at home in this fictional world. It also features some pretty cinematography, though its mostly blue color pallet grows dull after a while, but the images are sleek and well composed. The beauty isn’t only found visually, as the film is full of interesting little ideas and a few twisty story turns, but you have to be willing to stick around long enough for those twists to pay off.
Primarily, the film is dull, and one can imagine the audience too checked-out by the third act to enjoy the action finally arriving. Until then, the tone is so one-note, and the characters are so one-dimensional, there isn’t much reason to stick around. We spend most of our time watching Clive Owen’s character fall apart, but we were never given much incentive to care for his well being in the first place. In all the dreary blue vagueness, it’s hard to stay focused on the lengthy middle portion of place-holding disguised as weak character development.
A greater issue, which rears its awkward head at minute one, is the mannered dialogue. It’s formal to the point of achieving unintentional comedy. Every character speaks in a kind of flowery Victorian vernacular, and it doesn’t quite suit anyone (or, they don’t quite suit it), with the exception of the invincible Mogan Freeman. Coming from his mouth, the heightened language seems to make sense, but from practically anyone else, it sounds like a preteen desperate to sound intelligent and failing.
You know that thing people do when they say “therefore” inappropriately… like it can be used as a kind of Rationality Glue to bring two ideas together that don’t work? It kind of sounds like that.
The climax brings a clever and fun siege sequence, and that would redeem this humdrum picture if, again, we had a couple well-drawn characters for which to cheer. There is plenty of good work here for a few crew members to add to their reels, but not enough to recommend this to anyone who can wait for the next season of Game Of Thrones. Sadly, I can understand this film being relegated to direct-to-video distribution.
