SCATHING... whew.... Well folks remember, this is just ONE PERSON's opinion, but I do have to chime in with my disapproval in theory of putting Beowulf 2000 years in the future. Given I've never seen a film account of the actual story thus far. This was an early screening, let's see how other people reacted to the film, but... well looks like the curse of Lambert may be here...

Beowulf:

Not the legend, not a reasonable facsimile, not a movie—Avoid

So a good friend of mine emails me and says he has passes to a free screening of an upcoming science-fiction-y movie, “set 2,000 years in the future”. Hmm—could it be a blind for a screening of Trek? Of Vortex? What the heck, it’s off to Mission Hills for a screening.

What we saw was not the latest Trek movie, nor anything else I’d ever heard of previously; it was a European disaster (not a disaster film, just a disaster) called “Beowulf”.

So, what’s wrong with this picture? Let’s start with the beginning. It starts inside a castle (It’s only a model, and a painfully bad one at that) where random guys in random aluminum armor are being randomly killed by some random monster. This so scares some random wench that she escapes the castle and is captured by the army which has laid siege to the castle. The wench is beaten up (extra-loud thumps and whumps anytime a woman is being hurt) and tied down to be executed. She’s saved by Lambert, who kills a bunch of henchmen too stupid to use projectile weapons on him or simply dismount him by sheer numbers. Then, after being saved, she runs back to the henchmen to be executed rather than face The Evil Within again.

Doesn’t sound too bad? Well, my explanation is far more coherent than the flick, trust me. Or the cinematography, or the “acting” (and I use that term loosely). Most of the actors have a wonderful future ahead of them as security guards, plywood, or possibly dimestore mannequins.

Almost the entire rest of the film takes place inside the castle, where Lambert’s bottle-blond Beowulf has come to kill the Ultimate Icky Evil, which appears to be a ripoff of the Predator alien crossed with a ghost (hides in a shape-change field, but also pops through walls). There are tedious battles with many killed people followed by tedious talking scenes with bad dialogue.

How bad? All the women and children are locked in the Sanctuary for their own safe-keeping. Even the homies in the audience could see what was coming… as soon as the door was locked, everyone was killed by the Evil Thing. (Wench Fresh must have sent new vixens over later, though, because there were dead servers in the Final Death Scene… Oh, I could go on.)

What else? The “two millennia in the future” bit was completely unused. It’s one of these mixmaster films which takes a little from multiple eras. They have bottled gas (gas jets everywhere), telescopes and advanced metalworking, but no gunpowder or electricity. Freeze-dried foods but no medicine. No logic, no thought, just random guys doing stuff.

Did I mention the two token black guys? Or that the oldest black guy is the first kill by the predator-clone monster after Christopher Lambert shows up? (Oh, he was wandering around in the dark, alone. After the monster kills a zillion others who do just that. Didn’t any of these people even see Alien?) Or the clinker dialogue, even bad by bad Z-movie standards?

It got so bad that even the wannabe-homeboy crowd would hoot and holler whenever the PG-13 sex scenes would start up… and then “awwww!” loudly when they would precipitously stop. There was really bad editing (Hint: Do Not Cut Angles In Mid-Word Without A Good Reason), a stupid overloud boring Techno score that seemed to be leftovers from Mortal Kombat 14: The Wheelchair Years, not one name actor other than formerly-good Lambert, poorly staged swordplay, too-cliched-for-Xena whirling through the air, stupid dorky aluminum armor, and bad horsemanship besides.

Beowulf is a mess from beginning to end, with no redeeming value. It doesn’t have enough chop-socky for the Mortal Kombat crowd, it doesn’t viddy enough of the old ultraviolence for the blood-spawn crowd, it lacks even the basics of a story for the sensitive types. Those who are hoodwinked by the name into thinking it has anything to do with the legend will return to the theatres with pitchforks and firebrands. To paraphrase Monty Python: “This is not a movie for viewing. This is a movie for laying down and avoiding.”

My rating: square root of minus one. Wait until Mike and the ‘bots get ahold of this turkey; don’t spend even a dollar to rent it. I got in free, and I felt like sending a bill for services rendered to Andy at NRG.