This movie sucks!

Rating: 2/10 (12 January 2010)

I hate viking movies, but my review is not biased its just my opinion.
The plot is about a guy vanished from his land and told to go up north and be Ambasador and he is in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up having to help a bunch of viking fight a bunch of crazy men in bear suits. --- OK does that excite you...
This movie took so long to get going, It is almost an hour into the movie before anything remotely exciting starts to happen. When it does happen the direction is so bad you cannot see half of what is being shown. John McTiernan directed it and writer Michael Crichton was calling a lot of the shots so I don't know who to blame. John often does a pretty good job as director so I guess it's Michaels fault. Crichton has written some nice work but I am not a fan of his work here.
The acting was pretty bad, it seems like a reject cast from Braveheart. Most of the cast is English, Irish or Scot and they are playing Vikings, that is just funny. Antonio Banderas as an Arab with his strong ass Spanish accent was too much for me, one of the worst casting mistakes ever. The movie was so laughable it was impossible to take serious.
What the hell is up with the language thing? Ahmed only speaks Arabic yet he quickly learns their language which is Norse, and as soon as he learns it they all suddenly speak English. Perhaps it was a way of not making the viewer have to read subtitles the whole movie, but it was absolutely stupid to me. I am glad Omar Shariff didn't go along and have to translate everything for Banderas' character like he did the first 30 minutes of the movie because that was very annoying.
As I have said the direction was so sloppy during battles, the camera was right there inches away and making it impossible to see anything - I hate fight scenes like that, pull back you idiot let me see the fight!! I thought it was funny with the enemy here as well, thousands of men in bear skin outfits, I would've been more scared a bear would kill me than those men. If the men all had a bear outfit then that land must've been crawling with bears, but thats just my thought.
I also have to point out the old wise woman they go to see who talks like Yoda... brilliant lol, I am being sarcastic. I thought it was embarrassing that filmmakers always use Yoda as the wisest of them all and have mocked him in movies every since Empire Strikes Back came out.
BAD BAD movie, thats all I can say. It's is very slow, it has stupid actors playing parts way out of their league and race also. It has the 13 warriors going to protect a town from bad things, so I recommend you watching The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven to get that. It has mid-evil battles with mysterious creatures, I recommend Lord Of The Rings for that.
If you love viking movies and don't care about story or facts or good acting or good directing then you might like this, if you are just one of those people who watch movies and doesn't analyze it then maybe you can tolerate it more than I.