4 stars...for the dragon.

Rating: 2/10 (9 December 2007)

Others have said it better than me but that's not going to stop my putting in my 2 pence. Here we have yet another classic work that has been compromised to presumably tell a more, presumably, "believable" tale. We're expected to believe Beowulf is flawed and that he's bragging about his exploits, yet we witness him performing the kind of feats he's supposedly bragging about. Perhaps someone can explain that to me.
The part where he demonstrates he really is flawed is when he is seduced by the presumably irresistible "Monster Queen" as played by Angelina Jolie. This is some pretty tawdry film-making. Basically, we're led to believe that no man, however hardy, can resist seduction and we're left with this bitter taste at the very ending of the film. That this is all part of some vicious, unending cycle.
We also have an alleged romance between Beowulf and Wealthow invented for the movie, yet I never saw any evidence of it on the screen, so why bother? The character herself was annoying as all get-out. Most of her "performance" was in giving endless wistful looks and showing off how pretty her face is. To be fair, some of these ideas themselves aren't really that awful...when explored on their own. When transposed on an epic work, they just ring false.
As does the animation. Loved the scenery but the character animation didn't do it for me. Despite, the exquisite textures (on the main characters, anyway; the extras looked like they came straight out of the Shrek movies), the renderings of humans didn't strike me as particularly convincing, especially the eyes. They are just off. They come off as cold, and thus, so do the characters. And men riding horses came off as risible.
However, the dragon sequence was awesome (despite the nature of the beast being changed for the film); cant' find any fault with that, probably because I'm a sucker for dragons. Hence the relatively generous rating.