Astoundingly Stupid

Rating: 1/10 (26 February 2008)

I try to avoid coming down too hard on dumb action movies. They are what they are, and in general, they work fine at being dumb, loud, and entertaining. Not Beowulf. In all honesty, I went to the movies to see a rip off of 300, and it's exactly what I got, albeit with even less quality than ripping off 300 implies. Whether or not it diverged too much from the original Beowulf story, it's a horrible movie. The dialog would make George Lucas blush, the animation, while at times brilliantly done, makes all its characters look like wax dummies, and the story made me want to scream at the screen for being so dumb. In the grand tradition of idiotic epics like the book Beowulf (that's right, I said it. Just because it's old doesn't mean it isn't basically the medieval equivalent of Power Rangers), this movie made my brain cells cry out in pain. Aside from being a dumb actionfest (which really wouldn't be that bad), it felt the need to pretend that it had any sense of moral ambiguity and nuance. Rather than accept that it's a really bad movie and revel in it, it goes into self parody territory with the sheer volume of pseudo-meaningful BS. It's like a movie made by the 14 year old metalhead who thinks that he's the most brilliant human being alive for listening to Dream Theater. It's just a bad, bad movie that thinks it's something better.