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Up to now, writer-director Neil Marshall has specialized in horror movies (Dog Soldiers, The Descent), but here, he imagines and communicates a remote world with terrific energy and a passion for detail.
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80Centurion has its moments of manly cornpone camaraderie and certainly isn't blazingly original, but it offers riveting storytelling, gorgeous cinematography and scenery, loads of gore, and a politically complicated history lesson.
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80Fast-moving, epic-on-a-shoestring tale of one Roman soldier's fight that is by turns heroic, fearsome, funny, fateful and, oh, so brutal, with swords hacking off heads at every turn.
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80"Doomsday," horror-trained British helmer Neil Marshall flexes strong action muscles and carves copious flesh here, creating the sort of broadsword-based bedlam that will thrill fans of ancient martial movies.
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75Marshall, who helmed the underrated horror film, "The Descent," has a flair for the visual. Some of the mountainscapes, captured by use of a helicopter, are nothing short of spectacular.
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The plot's pretty thin -- even for a gladiator movie. Fortunately, when it comes to crunchy impalings and messy arterial geysers, Marshall's a maestro.
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70Centurion delivers some large-scale action but plays almost like a Roman-era Western in its depiction of a few soldiers trying to get home alive after the slaughter of their comrades.
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70If you're like me, and you find yourself retreating to a safe place in your mind whenever human beings are being graphically decapitated on screen, you'll spend the majority of Centurion, horror maestro (The Descent) Neil Marshall's Roman bloodbath, on psychological lockdown.
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70The real message: Life's ultimate pleasure lies in extreme fighting - to the death.
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70The film has a resigned bitterness, hard to shake off, that feels right for the experience of tough guys, from whatever period of history, who find themselves at the tattered edge of what they take to be civilization.
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67If I believed in the concept of "guilty pleasures," I'd classify "Centurion" as one, but I think I maybe just kind of enjoyed it.
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63The profanity is delightful. And the general atmosphere is grim. The movie just isn't terribly inspired.
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60A gritty, brutal chase movie that's more about swords (and spears, and axes) than sandals - although it could have done with a lot more character-meat on those bones.
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60It's prime B-movie material put through the Ridley Scott Cuisinart.
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58Centurion offers little beyond viscera for its own sake, without anything like the bold abstraction of "Valhalla Rising."
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58Compared with, say, Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," which featured this sort of stuff in practically every frame, Marshall's film is downright Disneyish.
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50Even if the movie had more shadings, though, Marshall's political point would undo his he-man action-flick format. If you're looking for a rallying cry to make the emotions sizzle, "Quagmire!" isn't it.
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There's little here about soldiers and mercenaries that isn't lifted from other movies, though Marshall elicits a steady seriousness from his actors (especially Michael Fassbender, in an introverted lead performance), which generally keeps the movie from sliding into camp.
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40Marshall shows off the breathtaking landscape, but with interiors, he populates the ale houses and encampments with cliches - like dueling female warriors, one a mute and the other a white-haired vixen.
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25There are six standard types of violence in film these days: Tarantino, comic book, Scorsese, martial arts, horror and stupid. For stupid, look no further than Centurion.
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20To say that Marshall's technique is so low-brow it may as well be a moustache is being kind--at best this is the sort of lazy, ambitionless hackery that can lead both filmmakers and audiences to write off a genre for dead--or at least until a more skilled storyteller is able to do it right.