Neil Marshall has honed a reputation as a champion of British horror with classics such as Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent (2005), but his attempt to bring his bloody aesthetic to a larger canvass has produced a historical splatter movie of dubious appeal and limited interest.
The story takes as its starting point an attempt by the Roman empire to complete its conquest of Britain. This has been held up in the barbarous wilds of Scotland by Pictish warriors who engage in a guerrilla campaign of great cunning and savagery. The story is loosely based upon the destruction and disappearance of the Legio IX Hispana, one of Rome’s most ruthlessly efficient fighting units that suddenly disappeared from the historical record in mysterious circumstances in the early part of the second century.
Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) is an officer stationed at a bleak and frozen frontier post who is captured by the Picts but manages to escape after meeting up with a Roman column (the 9th Legion) that is marching to destroy Pict resistance. He is welcomed as a source of local knowledge by the general Virilus (Dominic West), a fighting general eager to come to grips with his adversary.
The column is led into an ambush and cut down almost to a man. A few survivors remain, and the film follows seven of them, led by Dias, who try to escape through the wilderness. Hard on their heels is Etain, played by Quantum of Solace Bond girl Olga Kurylenko, who is out for vengeance for atrocities committed by the Roman army in her village. She sports what might be described as a folk-punk look, and is accompanied by other leggy woman warriors, who are doubtless there to cater to Marshall’s core audience of young men, but seem a highly improbable addition to a Highland fighting force.
A strong cast that includes Michael Fassbender and Dominic West has plenty of potential to take the film into a more nuanced look at violent men under pressure, but Marshall has commercial interests at the forefront of his mind. There is gory butchery aplenty as Etain and her posse take out the Romans one at a time, and the film degenerates rapidly into a not very exciting escape movie. Copious attention is paid to creating some decent fight sequences, but the characters are too hastily drawn for us to feel much interest in their demise. The backdrop of wild Highland scenery, while undoubtedly beautiful, fails to generate the atmosphere of brooding foreboding that Marshall is trying for.
Centurion is further tarnished by a romantic interlude that brings in yet another bit of eye candy in the form of Arian (Imogen Poots), a woman living alone in the depths of the forest having been ostracized by the Picts for witchcraft. It’s all a bit too convenient. The romance between Dias and Arian manages to blossom in a matter of seconds and just paves the way to wrap up the story with a sweet little bow.
Centurion has the same gore mixed with laddish humor as Dog Soldiers, which was a minor classic of new British horror, and Marshall is now covering similar ground with bigger names and bigger sets, but the humor has gone sour and the director’s competence with spilled guts and decapitated heads is not enough in itself to make this film work.
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