slasher horror flick masquerading as epic fantasy

Rating: 1/10 (18 July 2011)

**contains spoilers** Have you ever had a miserably bad experience at a restaurant that you previously had thought would be stellar because of all the good reviews? This movie is that restaurant. It's all hype but the king has no clothes, though few would admit it. What it really is is a badly done horror movie hiding behind the facade of a fantasy wrapped in a war movie. What better ploy to show gobs of blood and gore? This movie is a blood fest and the only love the director shows for any of his characters, is the loving embrace by the camera every time blood is in the scene. Someone is stitching his own mouth: Close-up please! Someone is being beaten about the head: Close-up please! Someone is being tortured: Close-up please! Someone needs an amputation: Close-up please! It was so ridiculous that I almost expected to see "Blood" make an appearance in the screen credits. You know you're watching a bad movie when every single major character takes actions that are completely out of character and it doesn't take long to figure out that the reason for such is that you are being rather obviously manipulated because the director has another blood fest to embrace in the next scene. Incidents don't occur to advance the plot, they occur to advance the gore. In one scene the rebels actually start a campfire in midday in clear view of the enemy base camp. At first you think that no rebel army could be so stupid and that it is probably a trap. Well, think again. There is no trap; they actually did start a fire in the middle of the day for no other apparent reason other than, one presumes, to warm their lunch! The rebel army is composed of morons who leave astonishingly stupid clues behind so that key benefactors can later be implicated and/or murdered (in gory close-up, of course). The rebels have a spy at the enemy base camp but do you think the spy would take the opportunity to poison the enemy leader? No, of course not. Instead, the spy uses her plumb position to act as postal carrier! When she actually does have a prime opportunity to kill the enemy leader, she instead squanders it by simply cutting his mouth open. (How else could you have the self-stitching close-ups later on?) She then leaves and walks right past the very people who apprehended her in the first place. Did she honestly think she wouldn't get caught walking in plain view of them? The stupidity of the characters in this movie is mind boggling. This isn't Hitchcockian suspense, it's more like B movie schlock fest alerts; every time someone does something stupid, you know blood will follow. The stupidity isn't what you would expect from characters in a real first rate movie. However, the stupidity is exactly what you would expect in a movie like Freddie vs. Jason or some such teen slasher movie. And that's really all that this is; it's a slasher masquerading as a fantasy wrapped in a war movie. After all, you have to at least pretend to have some semblance of a plot. When someone finally does decide to poison the enemy leader, he occasionally stumbles but otherwise, the lethal dose has little impact; exactly what one would expect from the hard-to-kill "Jason" type character typical of most slasher movies. But what I found most offensive of all was the death scene where the little girl is by herself with the spy a few steps away, not even comforting/hugging her but instead humming a wordless "lullaby" that sounds more like a depressing and wordless funeral dirge. Aberrant and abhorrent.