Full of joy and good cheer - not really

Rating: 7/10 (5 May 2010)

If you like your films to be dirty, cold, bleached out, full of violence and misery, then you're going to have a ball with this one.
It's the fag end of the Roman occupation of Britain, and a small group of Romans is trying to escape from the irate Picts on the wrong side of Hadrian's Wall. The problem is that the mute tracker Etain (Olga Kurylenko) isn't working for the Romans after all.
That's it really - one long chase across some of the bleakest landscapes ever put on film, with intermittent slaughter. The script is functional and occasionally witty. The performances are mostly OK, insofar as you can tell underneath the layers of furs and grime.
The action sequences tend to suffer from both hand-held camera syndrome and quick cutting syndrome - it isn't always easy to follow what's going on.
I do wish Imogen Poots would change her surname, she sounds like a character out of Monty Python.
But, of its sort, it is entertaining enough.