CENT-icon

The suc­cess of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator prompted a brief revival of sword & san­dal cin­ema.  Action fans would have no doubt wel­comed a string of macho sword and san­dal epics.  Unfortunately, the films that resulted — Troy and Alexander among them — were over­stuffed and unfo­cused big-budget duds that failed to deliver the old-school hero­ics and bloody sword­play that genre fans were hop­ing for.  As a result, the revival qui­etly fiz­zled out.

It might have been a dif­fer­ent story if Hollywood had instead pro­duced some films like Centurion.  This recent British effort from Neil Marshall is exactly the kind of rous­ing, bloody adven­ture fare that action fans love.  For starters, it uses a novel set­ting as its hook: it takes place in England dur­ing 117 A.D., when the Romans were try­ing to con­quer that land and found them­selves locked in bat­tle with the tena­cious, guerilla-minded Picts.  The film illus­trates this con­flict in its open­ing scenes as a Roman set­tle­ment is over­run by Picts and Centurion Quintus Dius (Michael Fassbender of Inglourious Basterds fame) is kid­napped because he can speak the Pict language.

After a tor­tur­ous stint as a pris­oner, Quintus escapes and is saved from a group of chas­ing Picts by Roman sol­diers.  He teams up with their gen­eral, Titus (Dominic West), and they plan an attack of the Picts with the help of rene­gade Pict-turned-guide, Etain (Olga Kurylenko).   Unfortunately, she is a double-agent who leads them into an ambush that wipes out most of the Roman bat­tal­ion and ends in the cap­ture of Titus.  Quintus ral­lies with the sur­vivors and plots to free Titus.  It’s a sui­cide mis­sion — and even if they res­cue the gen­eral, they have to escape through treach­er­ous for­eign lands as the wolf-like Etain leads the chase.

The end result is a brac­ing mix of the old and the new: it’s got the macho heroes and the derring-do of vin­tage sword & san­dal epics but it is has updated the for­mula in some inter­est­ing ways.  For exam­ple, women have better/stronger roles to play in this mod­ern take on the genre: Etain is a for­mi­da­ble foe (as is Axelle Carolyn, who essays the role of a fel­low female Pict war­rior) and there is also a heroic, inde­pen­dent female char­ac­ter played by Imogen Poots who assists the heroes in the lat­ter part of the film.

Another mem­o­rable addi­tion to the genre in Centurion is a sur­pris­ingly high level of gore for a non-horror film.  The action scenes give the viewer no quar­ter as they dis­play all man­ner of hor­rific sights: bloody spec­ta­cles include a spear to the groin, a knife through the eye into the brain and a sword impal­ing one hap­less soul through the mouth as well as count­less slash­ings, behead­ings and limb-lopping.  Some of the arte­r­ial spray effects are han­dled via CGI and that might annoy a seg­ment of the audi­ence — but these effects are ren­dered bet­ter than in other recent CGI gore spec­ta­cles (ahem, Ninja Assassin) and the dig­i­tal stuff is com­bined with plenty of old-fashioned on-set gore FX.

Centurion is also skill­fully acted by a well-chosen European cast.  Fassbender is suit­ably dash­ing as the never-say-die hero and han­dles the action with con­fi­dence.  West also reg­is­ters strongly as the macho gen­eral and Liam Cunningham gets in a few nice scenes as a sur­viv­ing sol­dier who becomes a trusted ally for Quintus.  On the vil­lain side, Ulrich Thomsen gives a sub­tly omi­nous per­for­mance as the Pict leader but its Kurylenko who really car­ries the bad-guy side of things.  Her char­ac­ter is mute so she has to con­vey every­thing via phys­i­cal pres­ence and she makes it work with a feral yet haunt­ing take on the role.

Finally, Marshall’s direc­tion seals the film’s barn­storm­ing appeal.  Fans who feared he might have lost his way with unfo­cused, curi­ously unin­spired Doomsday can breathe a sigh of relief because his work here is focused and sharp.  He main­tains a taut pace through­out, han­dling both the large-scale and more inti­mate scenes with con­fi­dence as he punc­tu­ates the film with sev­eral pre­cise, hard-hitting action scenes.  He also makes fan­tas­tic use of the win­try coun­try­side set­tings, effec­tively deploy­ing a reg­u­lar stream of aer­ial shots to enhance the film’s visual scope.  If there’s a crit­i­cism to be made here, it could be said that the final few scenes seem a lit­tle hastily-constructed com­pared to the rest of the film — but that’s a small quib­ble in light of how well the film works overall.

To sum up, this trib­ute to a vin­tage genre has enough forward-thinking ele­ments to allow it to play well on mod­ern terms.  Thus, Centurion is a solid selec­tion for cult film types in search of a qual­ity mod­ern action flick.