Works well for me... as a parody.

Rating: 4/10 (2 July 2010)

The 3D glasses and a group of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture enthusiast really made me enjoy the movie. The arrows were flinging, the coins were showering, the branches poked my face and while other people laughed only at the weak sex-related jokes we laughed at every change of the original story and every cheesy bit of dialog, so in fact all the time.
To make it clear to all of you who are not that much into history of literature: Beowulf was most probably written by an Anglo-Saxon poet-monk in England about the pagan heroes from somewhere about today's Denmark/Sweden. I imagine he just loved the simple legend about a fight of good vs. evil so he adapted it and skilfully imputed that it was the good God who help the good-willing pagans to fight the evil monsters even though they didn't know Him. It was written in a beautiful style and was appreciated by numerous generations.
Contemporary world, however, seems not to be a place for heroes anymore. People go through moral and psychological struggles, the monsters that we fear are not outside, they are in us. However, making the characters the monsters' fathers in the most literal sense is a bit of overdoing in showing this.
For the creators of the movie the ideas of good and evil were not attractive at all. It looks as if they tried really hard to make a point against Christianity even though it didn't fit the historical settings at all.
Putting an actual date at the beginning made a funny pseudo-historical introduction. The Dark Ages are dark, but then you have late medieval strongholds and renaissance music. Pretty indeed, but pure nonsense, just like Angelina's Old English. She pronounced it perfectly, so did Gollum, er, Grendel, but it's most illogical! Everyone speaks modern English and the monsters apparently Old English. I would guess that the characters spoke Norse and West Germanic dialects and monsters didn't speak at all, because they were monsters, not golden Lara Croft with stiletto shoes and her bastard son. Only our poet-monk spoke Old English, but if the whole movie was in Old English with subs it would have been awesome.
The movie rather looked and sounded pleasant and the 3D was entertaining. The humans were a bit doll-like and there were a lot of idiotic ways to "cover" their private parts. The panoramas were beautiful, though mountains and stone walls don't do justice to the original swamps and woodwork of the times and place given.
Apart from lack of consistency in recreating the settings and atmosphere of the Dark Ages it is mainly the change of the whole story and turning the back on the very idea of a hero that makes me so critical about this movie. We really need to hear a legend about a good hero who kills an evil monster from time to time to have the strength to deal with our inner struggles. The creators of the movie wanted to outsmart it and made something hysterically funny instead.
I give as much as 4/10 since 2 is for a movie that I managed to watch at all, +1 for pretty visuals and 3D effects, +1 for hilarious anachronisms and Angelina :)