Review: Centurion (Neil Marshall, 2010)

Neil Marshall has been in somewhat of a slump lately.  Dog Soldiers, while not the best werewolf movie ever made, was easily one of the most entertaining.  The Descent was a masterpiece of claustrophobic panic with the kind of strong female characterizations seldom seen in film today, let alone horror movies.  Unfortunately, Doomsday was overly reliant on masturbatory post-apocalyptic movie references to stand on its own as a legitimate piece of entertainment. Centurion is more "generic swords-and-sandals" to Doomsday's dystopian plagiarism.

Centurion follows (or attempts to, since there's more running in this movie than Gallipoli) Roman Centurion Quintas Dias (Michael Fassbender) as he runs away from, and then back to, and then away from, and then slightly back to the aboriginal "Pict" warriors as the Roman legion attempts to push farther into the northern reaches of the British isles, circa 112 AD.  All of the peripheral plot details are shared through Dias' mostly unobtrusive narration and thin stretches of dialogue before returning to more running and gouts of CG blood.  Somewhere in all of this there's a Pict tracker (Olga Kurylenko, permanently scowling former Bond girl) and woebegone tales of Roman atrocity, but it's definitely more 13th Warrior than it is Gladiator.

Marshall's direction is solid, if unimpressive, and he still has an ear for writing banter, particularly between soldiers.  His characters move with an easy camaraderie that you can find in most his films.  This does lead to a problem, however, when the gratuitous cursing becomes completely incongruous with Centurion's period setting, not to mention a late love interest is treated with laughable disregard.

From the groin stab that opens the movie, it displays a comical, almost ridiculous enthusiasm for violence that's infectious if you're into that sort of thing (bludgeoned with trees, bisected soldiers sort of thing).  The computerized blood is, unfortunately, extremely obvious and a wildly different color than the practical blood effects only seen in about five percent of the movie.

If you're in the mood for something you don't have to think about, or you're interested in seeing a disgustingly graphic depiction of deer entrails, you might consider this one.  I strongly believe that Neil Marshall has another great film in him, but Centurion isn't it.