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Fresh (61)
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DVD (5)
Auteur cinema of a very narrow stripe, this personalizes a familiar genre to advance a singularly pessimistic view of humanity.
Centurion wraps itself in talk of duty and honor, but really it's just another cinematic death-trip.
Marshall is big on desaturated imagery, which imparts to the film's copious amounts of hemoglobin the look of squid ink.
The film has a resigned bitterness, hard to shake off, that feels right for the experience of tough guys, from whatever period of history, who find themselves at the tattered edge of what they take to be civilization.
Marshall shows off the breathtaking landscape, but with interiors, he populates the ale houses and encampments with cliches.
Michael Fassbender can carry a movie.
With a raucous, gruesome tone, this Roman-era British action movie takes us back in time in such a vivid way that we often feel a bit queasy while watching. If the story were stronger, we'd be glued to the screen.
The sight of a technologically superior occupying force coming a cropper in hostile foreign territory inescapably brings modern Afghanistan to mind.
Director Neil Marshall thrills yet again setting forth his own vision of the gladiator epic that pays tribute to the classic tropes of the sub-genre, but is concurrently a revenge film and journey in to darkness...
Centurion is the kind of B movie you watch on a Saturday night, your entire reaction encapsulated in one critically dodgy but apropos sentiment: "It kicks ass."
Features a commitment to craft that helps overcome issues of storytelling by providing a visceral, violent experience designed to get you in your gut and bones more than in your heart or head.
It's a cat and mouse game where we are stuck rooting for the cat even though it killed and raped thousands of mice.
If I believed in the concept of "guilty pleasures," I'd classify Centurion as one, but I think I maybe just kind of enjoyed it.
A pre-chainsaw extravaganza where the Romans talk like James Bond and the Picts have better military backgrounds than the American generals who invaded Afghanistan.
The real fate of the 9th Legion may never be known, but I'm sure whatever happened to them was more interesting than this movie.
Marshall's film has a good helping of subtle smarts, but he is more concerned through most of the running time with carnage and bloody thrills.
Centurion is like 'Gladiator' directed by Freddy Krueger
... fine for a midnight screening or a Saturday matinee (although it's too violent for kids) but doesn't hold up under close scrutiny.
Anachronistic dialogue, happenstance plot turns and characters so thinly conceived as to be interchangeable all but counteract cinematographer Sam McCurdy's otherwise stalwart Cinemascope work.
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