Barely worth the effort......

Rating: 4/10 (31 August 2000)

Let me start by saying that, for my money, few people handle an action movie in quite the way that John McTiernan does....lets face it Predator, Die Hard and Hunt for Red October are right up there with the very best of them. Whilst this recent offering is not nearly as bad as his almost unforgivable Last Action Hero, The 13th Warrior is one that should be watched and discarded without much ado. Suspension of disbelief was difficult to maintain, not least due to the almost laughable range of accents adopted by the principal characters. We'd expect that with Banderas who has, to his credit never attempted to disguise his latin tones, but the "Northmen" discuss their business in a dreadful mish-mash of Eastern European, Scottish, Irish and Cockney which, towards the end of the movie, I found increasingly irritating.
Michael Crichton's book "The Eaters of the Dead" , on which the movie was based, made much more of Ahmed's problems in adjusting to the cultural, religious and philisophical differences between his own race and the Northmen and even allowing for the fact that time and script constraints mean that such subjects cannot be fully explored in the movie, one comes away with a feeling that the entire opening hour of the movie serves no purpose other than to set the scene for the battle. Lastly, I should say that while I'm no fan of Antonio Banderas he does bring a pleasing presence and subtle humour to a movie that, in almost every other way, lacks substance.