Centurion: No Pax Romana Here

It is 117 A.D. and the Roman “conquest” of Britain has been a miserable, blood-soaked experience—for the Romans. Just ask Centurion Quintus Dias whom we first meet running for his life from a very ticked-off war party of Picts in Neil Marshall’s Centurion (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Posted to the most distant Roman outpost, Dias is miserable in Caledonian Britain (what is more or less Scotland today). Things only get worse when his fort is over-run by a Pict surprise attack. The sole survivor, Dias escapes his captors, making his way to what just became the newly Northern-most Roman outpost. Tired of taking a beating to his prestige back in Rome, the local governor commands General Virilus to hunt down the mysterious Pict leader Gorlacon with his vaunted Ninth Legion, to which Dias is now attached.

Virilus is not thrilled with his assignment, but he supposedly has the advantage of the services of Etain, a Pict tracker ostensibly civilized by the governor. Given the way her eyes smolder with hatred, following her into battle is probably a bad idea, but they do it anyway, with predictable results. Now Dias must lead the remnant of the Ninth as they try to rescue their revered General behind enemy lines.

Centurion is a fairly straight-forward historical hack & slash, with maybe a hint of the fantastical. At one point, Dias and his men find refuge with Arianne, a woman shunned by the Picts as a purported witch—not that she really is one. She just seems to know a lot about healing herbs. Neil (The Descent) Marshall definitely has a knack for gritty battle scenes, and the clever symmetry of his opening and closing scenes perfectly suits the story of ancient (if misplaced) heroism. Unfortunately, the film lags a bit in-between, with too many scenes of rock-climbing and limping through the Caledonian forests.

Michael Fassbender is one of the few actors working in film today with potentially movie star-like screen presence. Yet in Centurion, the grizzled badness of Dominic West’s Virilus somewhat outshines him. Still, he has some credible chemistry with Imogen Poots as Arianne the witch. Unfortunately, Ulrich Thomsen is a bland villain as Gorlacon (probably because the film is too conscious of its alleged modern parallels), while as Etain, former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko looks distractingly blue, almost like she walked out of Avatar. Oddly, the Centurion’s Romans are played by Brits, whereas the Britons are mostly played by Scandinavians, Slavs, and even the Belgian Axelle Carolyn.

Centurion’s craftsmanship is definitely above average for action films. Cinematographer Sam McCurdy’s dazzling vistas make the Caledonian mountains look like the Alps. It also boasts one of the cooler opening title sequences of the year. Still, its heavy-handed “occupiers” versus “insurgency” themes often sabotages the film’s momentum. Ultimately, it is an okay summer diversion, but it is effectively limited by its reluctance to definitively pick a side and stick with it. It opens Friday (8/27) in New York at the Angelika.

(Poster by British comic artist Simon Bisley)

Six Shooter: Bronson

Michael Peterson is an inconvenient man. A cause célèbre for many, he has spent most of the last thirty-four years behind bars, largely in solitary confinement, despite having been originally arrested for relatively minor crimes. However, he is also an exceptionally violent person, who after adopting the “Charles Bronson” persona inspired by the Death Wish movie-star, seems to prefer the brutality of prison life in Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s highly idiosyncratic Bronson (trailer here), the first installment of Magnet’s second Six-Shooter series of international genre films, which opens in New York tomorrow.

Peterson/Bronson was originally sentenced to seven years for an armed robbery that yielded just over twenty-seven pounds. Once in prison though, he discovered he was in his element. During a brief period of liberty, he fought in the underground boxing circuit, where even his unsavory manager found him a little off. While incarcerated, “Bronson” became a published poet and artist, leading many to call for his release, even though the notorious inmate once held his liberal do-gooder art teacher hostage for nearly two full days. After all, he never actually hurt the man they hasten to point out.

Bronson’s outsider art might be oddly compelling, but in Refn’s film, prison is his real canvas, where he stages elaborate acts of violence as if they were performance art. These always seem to culminate with Bronson stripping down to his altogether and tooling on the skulls of the sad sack prison guards sent to subdue him. Though certified legally sane, it frankly seems like the state had the right idea when they stashed Bronson in a loony bin, zonked out on tranks.

Refn and co-writer Brock Norman Brock do not supply any easy explanations for Bronson’s anti-social behavior. His parents seem relatively unremarkable, yet even as a child Bronson was spoiling for a fight. Granted, a girlfriend’s rejection spurs the crime that led to his second extended stretch in prison, but it really just seems to underscore how ill-suited Bronson is for life in the outside world.

Those expecting Bronson to be a grittily realistic prison drama will be a bit surprised by Refn’s highly-stylized approach, featuring surreal vaudeville-like interludes accompanied by voice-overs written by Bronson himself. However, Tom Hardy creates a singularly fascinating screen character in Bronson, combining the calculating savagery of Hannibal Lector with the showmanship of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury (whom the mustachioed Hardy somewhat resembles here).

Bronson is a violent, frequently disorienting film, but it is never dull. Ironically, though Hardy’s remarkable portrayal endows Bronson with a certain snake-like charm, it may well convince viewers he should be looked away for life, perhaps in contradiction of the filmmakers’ original intentions. It opens tomorrow (10/9) at the Angelika.