Why did they bother?

Rating: 2/10 (31 August 2000)

This is probably the worst would-be swashbuckler I've ever seen. It's more like a two-hour trailer than a movie. No character or scene in it is fully realized. The camera takes astonishingly little interest in any of the clothes, weapons, dwellings, ships, or other artifacts of the period, and the fights are shot so closely in as to reveal nothing. One has only to compare these evidences of inattention to the same director's treatment of modern subjects, e.g. in Predator or Die Hard, to recognize that he isn't one whose imagination extends into the past. Perhaps this is why he allows the script to be insufficiently defined as well. After a meandering start, it settles into a series of inconclusive battles and then stops arbitrarily. The story that the main character discloses in narration about how he came to be in the story in the first place is more interesting than all that follows. Would the director - or rather, a different director - had shot that instead.