Rather hoary old hokum, but it should do the biz for those who like that kind of thing

Rating: 5/10 (1 March 2014)

It would be rather too easy to poke gentle fun at Centurion, and I'm afraid it's a temptation I shall find impossible to resist, but although I've read that it was made on a budget - £10 million is regarded as rather a small budget in the film-making world, I gather - that is not obvious, so it deserves a little respect.
Writer/director Neil Marshall has used his imagination well and I doubt whether an extra £90 million would have made much difference, if any at all. All in all it is more or less a piece of Boys' Own hokum about a bunch of Roman soldiers, the sole survivors of a massacre by the Picts of Rome's Ninth Legion, who have to make their way home through a very inhospitable Scotland, all the while tracked by a posse of vicious Picts led by a mute woman who has nothing on her mind at all but revenge (and who sports a startling amount of kohl on her eyelids throughout).
In sum, it's a chase film, and there's nothing much wrong with that if that's your bag. Unfortunately, it isn't mine unless there's a little more and here there isn't. Characterisation is minimal and there's no plot to speak off.
Aspects of the film which left me underwhelmed were just how fast and loose Marshall played with Scottish geography: one minute our intrepid gang of Romans are several thousand feet high crossing a snowy mountain, and barely ten minutes later they are trekking through the kind of dense woodland you will not find in the Highlands. I hate to disillusion non-Brits, but there's an awful lot of rather dull countryside in the middle of Scotland before you get to the Highlands (and for the record I rather like The Borders).
I am also always disconcerted in these films by how men who are living rougher than you and I will ever have the misfortune to live manage to remain more or less clean-shaven throughout. Yes, I know that has a lot to do with production schedules and that films are rarely shot in rigid sequence, but it does rather spoil an illusion. I was also rather puzzled as to where our gang of Romans managed to pick up their rather natty furs. But what the hell, Centurion is, after all, nothing more than hoary old hokum and in its favour is that it pretends to be nothing more. OK, much of the dialogue is quotably heroic and at times a little ponderous but, but who knows, perhaps the Romans were rather like that.
And here's a spoiler: the hero gets the girl. I shan't tell you how - for that you'll have to watch the film yourselves. But it is reassuring how some staples of film can never be ignored.