Flat, cold take on a classic story.

Rating: 6/10 (26 November 2007)

Beowulf - From the maker of Polar Express Roger Zemeckis and writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery (who I'm still sore at for sinking the Silent Hill movie), we have Beowulf, a hero archetype come to life, well sort of. Everyone is layered densely in CGI, and the film exploits the usual weaknesses and strengths of CGI. It's awesome when used to show sea monsters being slaughtered (highly reminiscent of the God of War video game, and if a movie is made of that too, this is likely the formula that will be used) in some fairly cool bloody ways, but just cannot show human emotion as well as the real thing.
A monster Grendal (name inspires terror doesn't it?) whose sole power is being bat-s*** hideous (not scary, just really ugly) looking and sole-weakness is slightly stupider that that of the aliens in Signs, comes to town and wreaks havoc in an apparent desire to make the story interesting. Beowulf stops him relatively easily in a pretty cool fight scene, and the rest of the time we have to listen to some mildly boring dialog and some awkward character decisions. Best line? "There have been many a brave soldier come to taste my husband's mead."
John Malkovich's character beats a cripple at least twice with a stick and repeating in a monotone that the boy is spilling mead, in a scene I'm pretty sure was meant to be comical but comes off as cruel. Why? I didn't really sympathize with anyone. It's too cold in this fantasy world. The CGI gimmick kinda worked against them there. Robin Wright Penn was pretty bland as both eye-candy and in acting. Anthony Hopkins fans should avoid this as his character is frankly embarrassing. Crispin Glover "plays" Grendal the same way that Hugo Weaving did a voice-over for Megatron in the Transformers movie earlier this year; completely unrecognizable through a mask of effects to the point where anyone could've played the part. The only person well cast (typecast?) was Brendan Gleeson, as Beowulf's sidekick. Oh, and Angelina Jolie, as seduction itself in as close to a nude-scene as fanboys will get now that she's got all her kids going to see her films.
It's got a cool bit with a dragon at the end, but what does it all really matter when I don't care about the characters? Beowulf has an interesting story and one or two decent action scenes, but is mostly forgettable. a C+