Dull, ugly and mostly forgettable

Rating: 5/10 (6 December 2010)

Director Neil Marshall showed a lot of promise with his sophomore feature, The Descent. It was far from perfect, but it was a rare horror movie that was actually frightening. Marshall has unfortunately not advanced any since then. His followup, Doomsday, was an okay B movie, but it was most definitely forgettable. Centurion, his fourth movie (I never have caught up with his debut, Dog Soldiers), is even worse than Doomsday. It's a story about a group of Roman soldiers, led by Michael Fassbender, caught behind enemy lines, trying to make their way to Hadrian's Wall before the Picts, led by mute tracker Olga Kurlyenko, hunt down and kill them. When it's nothing but running and chasing, it ain't half bad. Anything resembling plot, though, stinks. I could barely understand the mush-mouthed Brits that populate the movie (apparently the Romans were made up of Cockney bootblacks), and when the Picts are subtitled, the font and color of the subtitles are illegible. The film has that awful processed blue tint throughout, and the action is edited in such a way that it's often hard to follow (also: CGI blood).