Review of Centurion (2010) by Matt B — 07 Jan 2011

Centurion shows the ill fated march of the Ninth Legion on Caledonia located in Britain north of Hadrian's Wall. The rough idea of the story is as follows; when the army is massacred in an ambush the survivors attempt to free their commander who was captured in the conflict while doing this they are rumbled and the Picts who send out a small force of trackers the next day to jizz on their parade. The Romans know what is coming and have to hatch a plan to evade the pursuers.

At first glance I thought the film was based on the novel of the same name by Simon Scarow as it was a Roman war film set in Britain but as the story unfolded this was proven to be untrue. The idea still excited me as all historical war films do so I still gave it a bash. The first twenty minutes were not so good, the movie launched into a whole bombardment of bog standard Romans acting the dog's bollocks with all that "I'm Marcus Testicleese from Jizzlopolis sent by the emperor" crack but after the survivors of the ambush emerge they seem to develop more character.

There were still some other faults with the feature like the whole concept... The idea of a bunch of heroes on the run is not an unseen one especially in historical movies i.e. "Apocalypto" and "10,000 BC". Another problem was that the black Roman was the same guy who played Mickey the assistant in the new Dr. Who meaning there was no way I could ever take his Roman banter seriously, lucky for me the movie doesn't focus on him too much. The final problem was that the leader of the people tracking them was one of those stereotypical evil butch women; in all fairness a woman would never be allowed a position that high in the army bad then unless she was born into nobility and more strangely there is not a chance in hell she would have such a lean figure, she would have to be ripped to bits to take out as many Romans as she did. It's obvious this was added to please the male body of the audience which makes you worry that they thought they needed to do this.

Putting all these faults aside this film is actually rather great, the best actor being Liam Cunningham who has just been appearing in loads of films for the past three years now playing a similar style role as in "Clash of the Titans" showing he is well adapted for these sorts of movies. The story was very well engineered and directed making me think it could possibly be the best version of that run away plot I was referring to before. The amount of blood in all the fight scenes is rather impressive reminding me of those Chinese war films set in the times of the three kingdoms and the climax to this movie was actually much unsuspected and pleasant.