TNMC
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The 13th Warrior ()
I can't say as I hated this movie. It did have its moments. But I can't say that I loved it either. Those moments were few and far between.
If you're not aware, this movie had a lot of trouble making its way to your theater. It was over budget and conflicts eventually led to the director being fired. Disney, in its boundless wisdom, decided to replace him with Michael Crichton, who wrote the book the movie is based on. After taking a look at his efforts for the reshoots and editing process, Disney put the movie on the shelf and left it there for more than a year, perhaps hoping that a good layer of dust might improve it. I'm guessing they wished they had left it on the shelf a while longer.
Let's give McTiernan some credit here. The movie looks good. Well actually it looks cold, damp, and dirty but that is the look you want for this kind of movie. Simply put the movie is about an Arab ambassador (Antonio Banderas) to the Northmen (vikings to us) who gets roped into joining a mission to help a small land suffering from invasion by mysterious evil bad guys. We don't know who they are because you can't say their name. After some requisite time on horses and in viking ships we get to the land and find out that these evil bad guys eat the dead. I'll stop telling you the plot there. Not so much to keep from spoiling it for you but more because there isn't much plot after that. The viewer is treated to numerous battles and adventures after that and almost all of them are badly lit so you have little idea what's going on.
This is one of those movies that you need to leave your brain on autopilot for if you want to have any hope of enjoying it. There are numerous points that cause the whole thing to fall apart if you start thinking about them. For instance our evil bad guys all wear bear heads. There are literally thousands of them. This area must have been crawling with bears. Or maybe they had to mail order them. We're told these guys only appear every hundred years. Maybe that's because it takes that long to collect enough bear heads. They all ride horses too. Not a big deal except that they live in caves. So where do they keep all these horses? I could go on and on.
I said the movie had its moments. Most of them center around the leader of this mission, Buliwif (Vladimir Kulich). This guy kicked ass. He is easily the coolest viking ever seen on screen. Unfortunately he's only a side character in the movie. The Arab, Ibn Fadlan, is the star. The movie might have actually worked if the focus was moved to Buliwif. If they had made Ibn an observer relating us the story of Buliwif and his men, it would have been much better. There would have been much less of Ibn trying to learn how to be a warrior and much more of Buliwif doing his thing.
Anyway, the movie's not horrible. It might be worth a matinee if you like big battles and lots of blood. Otherwise I wouldn't bother paying full price.
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