VALHALLA RISING

Look at that cover! F**king look at it! Quite possibly the most blatant bit of false advertising imaginable. Heres the synopsis, its sounds cool and I'm going to tell you why the actual film is not cool in the slightest, but actually w**k. Hard as nails, mute and optically challenged slave fighter from muddy viking-era scotland kills a few people in a grisly fashion to gain his freedom and then joins Christian warriors on a crusade to Jerusalem, except they take a wrong turn somewhere and end up in Canada(?) where they come up against the local unfriendly natives. Again look at that cover. Sounds good right? Vikings versus savage apocalypto-style natives, cant go wrong can you? Turns out you can ...YOU CAN GO VERY WRONG INDEED. While the cover would suggest a gory and action packed 300-style sword-and-axe filled epic romp, instead we have a handful of bearded men stumbling around in the mud for 80 minutes. It is the very opposite of "epic". The first 20 minutes are quite promising... very graphic violence, stunning cinematography, you'll be thinking "what was he on about, this is cool!" Alas, the movie then slowly, slowly morphs into a self-indulgent, surreal and painfully slow endurance test. It still looks great, but if I want to see something that just looks good I've got a mirror. Unbelievably anti-climatic ending as well, and probably deliberately so. There's a real whiff of anti-audience hostility here, or maybe its just a boring and pretentious wasted opportunity? Ultimately  I'd describe it as Terrence Malick's down-syndrome brother doing an arty remake of The Thirteenth Warrior, except much, much worse than that sounds.

I watched this film so you didnt have to. What a load of film-school c*ckwash. Instead of a rating, I've actually painstakingly recreated a far more accurate dvd cover for your education. Probably wouldnt shift as many units as the one above, but at least its not a shameless bit of blatant marketing misdirection.