Centurion

Review by SMH

BRITISH writer-director Neil Marshall has stolen a march on Hollywood with this hard-boiled widescreen war movie.

Like the forthcoming Eagle, Centurion speculates on the fate of Rome’s fabled Ninth Legion, which supposedly vanished into northern Britain in the second century AD.

In Marshall’s version of the story, the legion is slaughtered by an army of Picts, leaving a handful of survivors (led by the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender) to fight their way back home.

More concerned with action than history, the film can be seen as a companion piece to Nimrod Antal’s futuristic Predators, which maintains a similarly tight focus on a small group of dubious ”heroes”.

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Review by Horror

Much of the violence in recent, popular mainstream movies and historical dramas on TV (Watchmen, Inglourious Basterds, The Tudors and Spartacus to name a few) is far more brutal than your typical horror flick. At least Freddy Krueger makes it quick — some of the beheadings at the behest of Showtime’s King Henry the 8th were agonizingly slow and painful.

Writer-Director Neil Marshall’s latest gorefest falls somewhere in-between: His love of true horror (he directed the well-regarded supernatural thriller 2005′s The Descent) and his passion for action (the Mad Max’esque Doomsday came and went in ’08) blend together beautifully in the exceptionally well-cast Centurion.

Muscles-and-armor to-to guy Dominic West is Roman General Virilus of the Ninth Legion, brawny-yet-brooding actor Michael Fassbender is the centurion of the title, and the mysterious and dangerous woman-warrior they orbit is the mute and mad Pict, Etain (Olga Kurylenko). The supporting cast — though doing little more than aggressively killing everything in sight — is tight. Standouts include Imogen Poots as witch-in-exile Arianne, Riz Ahmed as the cook who’s just a little too good with kitchen utensils, and Axelle Carolyn as a piqued Pict.

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Review by Moving Pictures

Neil Marshall brings his particularly bloody brand of gore to the height of the Roman Empire with this chase movie/political allegory set on the Scotland moors. The son of a gladiator who won his freedom in the Coliseum, Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) leads a scrappy band of soldiers on a rescue mission into the heart of Pict tribal territory to rescue their general, Virilus (Dominic West, who’s, yes, virile). Unbeknownst to the other men, morally corrupt Thax (JJ Feild) kills the Pict general’s son during the raid, and a hunting party led by the fierce mute Etain (a glowering Olga Kurylenko) is set upon them.

Against a chilly, monochromatic backdrop, Marshall splatters blood in spectacular fashion. The use of color — or lack of it — gives his images a tactile essence. But the suspense and surprise he brought to “The Descent” is absent. Instead, the violence, cut in regular rhythm to the half-note progressions in Ilan Eshkeri’s score, is numbing, and the hand-to-hand combat of the final standoff is especially tedious, despite the camera’s best attempts to force some energy into the scene.

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