Metacritic Film

Last Legion, The

Starring Colin Firth, Ben Kingsley, Aishwarya Rai, Kevin McKidd, John Hannah, Peter Mullan, Rupert Friend, and Thomas Sangster

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sequences of intense action violence

The Weinstein Company
Action  |  Adventure  |  War
110 minutes | Color
USA / UK / France
Released In Theaters August 17, 2007

The Last Legion is a fantasy action-adventure in the vein of The Sword and the Stone set against the Fall of Rome and its last emperor, 12 year-old Romulus Augustus, the boy who would rule for a day before losing all that he loved: his family, his home. and an empire that once stood for truth and honor. Imprisoned on the island-fortress of Capri, Romulus searches for a means to escape. He discovers instead "Exaliburnus", the legendary sword of Julius Caesar, and realizes that he must do all in his power to save Rome. Aided by the clever strategies of his teacher Ambrosinus and the heroic skills of his loyal legionnaire Aurelius, Romulus escapes the island. Accompanied by his friends and a mysterious envoy from Constantinople, Romulus travels to Britannia in search of the last Roman Legion – the fabled Dragon Legion. There, Romulus will fight alongside his friends to make his last stand for Rome and take his first steps to becoming a man and he king who would father a legend. (The Weinstein Company)

WRITTEN BY
Carlo Carlei (story)
Peter Rader (story)
Valerio Manfredi (story), Tom Butterworth
Jez Butterworth

DIRECTED BY
Doug Lefler

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

37 / 100

Critic Reviews

63 TV Guide
While not exactly in the same league as the visually dazzling "Excalibur" and saddled with cheap looking CGI effects, this Anglo-Italian co-production has quite a bit of fun finding a direct path from the fall of Rome to the birth of Arthurian legend.
50 Boston Globe
The film is nothing to be ashamed of (especially if you're Kingsley). But it's as if everybody involved knows what the deal is.
50 Entertainment Weekly
Every once in a while, though, Firth's eyebrow hints, Can you believe I'm wearing this dorky leather breastplate?
50 The Onion (A.V. Club)
Though it's never wise to underestimate the power or universal appeal of Rai's cleavage and lustrous hair, that's about all that sets the doggedly mediocre The Last Legion apart from every other sword-and-sandal epic about the origins of Camelot.
50 ReelViews
When a movie wants to be sold as a spectacle, it had better deliver something more spectacular than this.
50 Los Angeles Times
Not as bad as it sounds nor as good as it might have been.
40 The New York Times
This might have made a good children’s film.
40 Variety
Seriously hampered by glaring inconsistencies of tone and intent, and often feels like a series of highlights carved out of a much longer epic.
40 The Hollywood Reporter
Lackluster and decidedly old-fashioned (in the worst way).
40 LA Weekly Jim Ridley
Second-rate sword-and-sorcery saga.
38 The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Distinctly humdrum, The Last Legion, a boy's adventure story that seems to have been dragged out of the vaults of some early-sixties TV series.
11 Austin Chronicle
The Last Legion offers guilty-pleasure fun in a cheesy, very De Laurentiis way (much like 1976's Mandingo rip-off Drum), but, in the end, it's just not a very inspired or well-conceived film, despite Kingsley's strangely endearing turn as the proto-Merlin.

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