Movie review in the Friday, Sept. 10 Oregonian....
Writer/director Neil Marshall is a gore-hound who loves to sample the sci-fi, action and horror classics that clearly turn his crank. He's pretty shameless about the sampling, but to my thinking he's also fairly good at it: When he's firing on all cylinders (as he was with 2005's "The Descent"), his movies have a confident, glandular, lizard-brain B-movie kick and stronger-than-strictly-necessary performances.
But yeah: Marshall's "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent" owe more than a little to "Aliens." "Doomsday" gleefully plunders from "Mad Max" and "Escape from New York." And his latest -- the vaguely historical action-survival flick "Centurion" -- may contain more "Lord of the Rings"-style helicopter shots than Peter Jackson's entire trilogy. (It also starts with that totally played-out wailing-woman music from "Gladiator.")
Still: Marshall is having enough fun smashing the skulls of talented actors while knocking off every men-on-a-mission and survival flick ever made (from "The Naked Prey" to "Apocalypto") that I enjoyed it as a solid beer-theater watch. And because the film is opening at Portland's Living Room Theaters, which happens to serve beer, it all works out rather well.
"Centurion" is the second of Marshall's films (after "Doomsday") to incorporate Hadrian's Wall; the new film luridly speculates on the fate of the Roman Ninth Legion, which may or may not have fallen to the Picts in Britain around 117 A.D. It's essentially a chase picture in which a handful of Roman soldiers (played by the likes of Michael Fassbender) try to rescue their captured general (Dominic West) and avoid getting picked off by a hunting party of Celtic guerillas led by a mute warrior princess (Olga Kurylenko).
The movie probably starts better than it ends -- the early ambush of the Ninth Legion is a grisly set piece that makes "Braveheart" look like "Sesame Street," and Marshall never tops it. Things also bog down briefly when the movie tries to introduce a love interest in the form of a bland outcast herbalist (Imogen Poots). There's also the small matter of everyone speaking in clichés.
But the movie mostly moves at speed, and it's awesomely, needlessly, hilariously gory -- Mr. Marshall never, ever sticks a blade in someone without cutting to a close-up of it popping out the other side or showing you exactly where the lopped-off head landed, and the earnest cast somehow sells it as drama. 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.
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(97 min.; rated R for sequences of strong bloody violence, grisly images and language; playing in Portland at Living Room Theaters) Grade: B-minus
'Centurion' (The Oregonian, Friday, Sept. 30, 2010)
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