Run of the mill action flick

Rating: 2/10 (13 November 2010)

Everything in this film is unbelievably predictable, stale, by-the-numbers, and obvious. You know right away that the minorities will die first; the Numidian (black guy), the Assyrian (arab guy), the Greek (arab-looking guy), etcetera. There's the standard archetypes, as opposed to characters; the grizzled old soldier, the straight sidekick, the noble superhuman leader who just knows everything on how to survive, including fluent Gaelic, even the token fist-fight with weapon just out of reach and bad guy and good guy racing to get the weapon in time.
I don't particularly mind the use of British accents, not just standard British, but the "lower" class type, Cockney, Liverpudilan, Scottish, Irish, etcetera to represent a wide variety of accents that such a mixed Roman Imperial army would have, but it becomes highly disorienting and rips you out of the immersion when they don't just speak with the accents, but use heavily British mannerisms in their speech.
There's virtually little to the characters to make them in any way compelling or likable. In particular, the General is said to be so great, like a father, brother, and even god to his men, yet this is never displayed. It's what TVTropes calls an "Implied Attribute", when a character is said to be in a certain way, yet it's never displayed on screen.
The sole token battle scene inspired promise initially, as they show a very well-executed display of Roman discipline, as they quickly got into Schiltron formation, making circles with their shields and spears pointed outward, but once the battle actually unfolded, it devolved to generic Hollywood 'one-man-army' type fighting, with the shields suddenly gone and the swords being used to block axes, and loads of gratuitous gore that at the very least isn't pointless, but is used to such excess that you start to easily spot CG gore, particularly when the blood is just TOO solid in tone---with no variations in color tone based on lighting or shadow.
The rest of the story is just the band of archetypes on the run from Etain, a Brigante who betrays the Romans in such a clear and obvious way, who hunts them viciously until a fight where just three of them survive.
There's even a token romantic subplot which is not only painfully devoid of chemistry, but completely and utterly pointless, without any relevance to the plot, likely just to inflate the run-time by 10 or 15 minutes (the movie is only 1 hour and 30 minutes).
There's not much of interest in this movie. It's typical in being problematic with historical accuracy, has some action, but hardly anything remarkable or not seen in other movies, and done better.
It's the sort of film you'd watch on TV once, maybe while doing something else.