This would have been a zero if not for some exciting action scenes and an expensive production design.

Rating: Null/10 (5 August 2001)

* 1/2 out of ****
The 13th Warrior is a film that has somehow managed to get a wide appreciation from so many audiences. How this has happened is way beyond me. As escapist entertainment, there's hardly enough excitement to make the film worth watching. As a serious in-depth look at Viking society, it's dreadful, repellant, and not particularly accurate. All I see here is a fairly boring and plotless film full of unpleasant imagery.
I suppose it's relatively impossible for any movie not to have a plot. Thus, the "story," as this one goes, begins with the journeys of Ahmed Ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas), a writer banished from his country because he was in love with a rich man's wife (and presumably, she back to him). He ends up hooking up with some Viking warriors and stays a bit longer than he hoped to as he realizes he has been chosen as the 13th warrior. Without his acknowledgement or permission, he has been enlisted to fight a ferocious enemy that has been assaulting another Viking village. What pretty much follows is another rendition of The Seven Samurai.
It's obvious The 13th Warrior has aspirations to be an epic, and I'm not certain if large portions were cut out of the movie, but it's only 100 minutes. Not that I'm really complaining since it's already dull enough as it is, but that's a bit surprising to see a short-length "epic." There are some action scenes and they are exciting when on-screen, but it's not enough to sustain the movie for its entirety. The movie features about twenty minutes of excitement, and nearly 80 minutes of complete boredom.
Director John Mctiernan is a skilled action filmmaker, as he has proven with Die Hard. Here, he helms some well-done setpieces, such as a large-scale nighttime invasion that looks disastrous for the village. The warriors' venture into the cave near the end is also pretty effective. However, Mctiernan also makes some terrible decisions in this film when it comes to some of the action. Though the battle scenes are fairly exciting, they're hindered by the night-time setting (it's either that or the overwrought slow motion). It would have been nice to see what the heck was going during some of these action-filled moments.
When there's no action on-screen, everything slows down to a snail's pace, with little of anything to maintain any interest. Mctiernan tries to build this up as a horror film, too, for some odd reason, almost as if though he thinks that we would be convinced that this ferocious enemy is really an army of demons when it's quite obvious it's just a group of people wearing bear skin. The revelation is a little unintenionally funny, as you have to wonder how long it took for these characters to figure it out (most especially Banderas, who seems to have the most common sense but shows little during his "it's a man" bout).
Some other things here are just plain stupid. (minor spoiler) The one-on-one fight between Buliwyf and the queen is a little too in favor of the Viking, seeing how it is he has a sword as big as a man and she's got a claw with very slow-acting poison. Plus, the Vikings go all the way down to this cave to take down this queen, and they accomplish their task and leave, but Banderas later finds out that in order to stop the army you have to kill the male leader. Why the hell didn't they just do that in the cave?

The movie has an expensive look to it, and you can tell a good bit of that 100 million dollar budget was spent on giving the movie it's grimy medieval setting. It's also damned unpleasant to look at. With so much mud, blood, disgusting characters, and body parts it's headache-inducing after a while. Oh, sure, I can take gore (quite easily, too) when it's in the service of a rousing story (a la Braveheart) or outrageous-style violence (George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead). But here, you just want to turn the film off and get a breath of fresh air outside. People are being hacked up for the sake just getting hacked up. I mean, I know war is senseless but in this movie's case this is just ridiculous.
The performances don't help much at all. Antonio Banderas and Diane Venora are the only two people I'm familiar with. Banderas tries his best to be likable and charismatic, but any charm of his is quickly counteracted by all the unpleasantness. Venora is given the thankless of job of appearing as his new lover, then just as quickly disappearing. Vladimir Kulich plays the lead Viking, Buliwyf, and I think I recognize the actor from the awful TV miniseries Pandora's Clock as the crazy suicidal pilot. Anyway, Buliwyf is obviously an inspiration from Beowulf, but this movie wouldn't make a particularly good substitute for the poem. Kulich acts the part as he's supposed to, I guess, which means to basically thrash a huge sword around at people. The actor (don't know his name) who plays the Viking who befriends Banderas is actually pretty good and somewhat likable. Everyone else is, for a lack of a better word, obligatory.
I've heard many reports about the troubles this film went through. Apparently, author Michael Crichton was upset with the way the movie was going and had Mctiernan fired (or maybe Mctiernan left, I'm not sure), then re-shot certain scenes himself. I have no idea what contributions he made and I don't think it made one bit of difference. All I see is a below mediocre effort at making a blood-soaked, exhilarating epic.