Review of Ironclad (2011) by Ola G — 07 Jun 2012

It is the year 1215 and the rebel barons of England have forced their despised King John (Paul Giamatti) to put his royal seal to the Magna Carta, a noble, seminal document that upheld the rights of free-men. Yet within months of pledging himself to the great charter, the King break his word and assemble a mercenary army on the south coast of England with the intention of bringing the barons and the country back under his tyrannical rule. The Baron Albany (Brian Cox) and the templarknight Marshal (James Purefoy) gathers a bunch of ragtag mercenaries to defend the mighty Rochester castle, a place that becomes the symbol of the rebels momentous struggle for justice and freedom.

Where should I start? This is an overdramatized, overacted and over the top movie in all bloody areas you can imagine. I knew from the opening sequence, when Paul Giamattis King John spoke in a mix of american and british english, that this would not hold up at all. This is just a poor B-movie with a poor script and maybe thats all it want to be, but I had hopes for a great knights tale. It is not. "Ironclad" miss all the important pillars that holds up a normal good movie. And I am not sure if the filmmakers had the intention to make it slapsticky in a bad way. And if you really want to mess up a movie make sure that, in this case Danes, speak some sort of jibberish. Poor. Just poor. I get the notion as well that the filmmakers were trying to bring "Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior" back in time. Did it work? No. I can not for my life understand why it is so hard to make a great dark, dirty and epic knight movie. Even Ridley Scott failed. Why, oh why?