Some good grimy & gory action but mostly the film is uninvolving with no characters, a weak plot and poor dialogue throughout

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2004)

In 922 AD, Arab courier Ahmed is in the Nordic area of the world when a call goes out for thirteen warriors to come forward and help defend a town in the far North that has found itself under attack from a terrible form of evil. When it is announced that the gods have indicated that the 13th warrior of the group must not be a man from the north, Ahmed finds himself volunteered.
Quickly he learns their language on the journey and he arrives to find himself in a battle against a species of bear-like demons who kill and eat their victims.
I can only assume that the R rating really hurt this film as it came to the UK with no so much a fanfare as a whimper. The adverts were there more or less but the audience was not. I'm not sure if the reshooting helped or hindered this film as I have not seen or heard anything about what they redid or why they did it but I found this final product to be hardly spectacular but certainly an enjoyable enough swords & battles film. Based on a book by Michael Crichton, it was a surprise to me just how weak the script was (I have not read the book) although I could see enough plot to interest me if it had been written without so much clunky dialogue and maybe just given me even one character that I could get to know. Instead the scripts just seems to be trying to get to the next action scene and even makes the mistake of trying to inject a form of modern humour to the proceedings  failing in a quite unfunny manner.
However what it does do pretty well is deliver battle sequences and solid bloody action even if they a little grimy and unshowy when you put them beside, say, Gladiator. However they are still enjoyable and the whole man/bear thing works a lot better than I expected it to; if only the script had been better then the action would have been more involving and therefore more exciting  as it was I found it to be enjoyable and bloody but I was barely engaged once. With such weak characters and dialogue to work with the cast are left just to try and look heroic and windswept  which is more or less all they manage to do. Banderas is quite a good presence but the rest of the cast are a mix of accents are really only serve to fill out the background without making much of an impact.
Overall I can see why this film failed to capture an audience because it isn't any great shakes. The script is where the problems lie as it delivers mostly clunky dialogue without any feeling and manages to produce almost no characters that make an impression. The action is grimy and gory fun but without any involvement in the story I was left watching as opposed to being really into it. A watchable period action movie but no more than that and one that will fade from my memory pretty quickly I'm afraid.