Colin Firth: Action Hero!

Rating: 4/10 (24 September 2010)

The cartoonish absurdity and fumbling melodrama of this movie can be summed up in a single phrase - "Look! It's Colin Firth: Action Hero!"
In the dying days of the Roman Empire, a young boy is crowned emperor just as the Goth's invade and sack Rome. The deposed child emperor Romulus (Thomas Sangster) is imprisoned on a distant island. His bodyguard Aurelius (Colin Firth) teams up with Mira (Aishwarya Rai), a mysterious warrior from the Eastern Empire in Constantinople, and leads a small band of generic action movie characters to free him. After freeing Romulus and the boy's teacher Ambrosinus (Ben Kingsley), our intrepid band also picks up a magic sword. Left with no other place to go, they set off to Britannia for the last Roman legion loyal to the emperor. They're pursued by Wulfila (Kevin McKidd), the Goth put in charge of Romulus' prison, and in Britannia they run into a guy in a golden goat mask named Vortgyn (Harry Van Gorkum). It all ends up in a huge battle where Aurelius has to rally the last legion with one of the lamest battle speeches ever and that ends with all of the enemy soldiers needing to have telescopes to know they've been defeated.
The Last Legion is like an action movie version of a paint-by-numbers picture. There are certain plot points and character moments that are standard in action movies and this film ticks through them like clockwork. These filmmakers don't even try to do anything we haven't seen in a hundred other action flicks before. Frequently, it appears the filmmakers don't even understand why they're telling the story the way they are. They just know this is how the story has been told before, and that's the only way they can think to tell it.
There's no sex in this film, there's no interesting dialog and the action is both pedestrian and fake. There's a scene where Romulus falls 30 feet to a stone floor, breaking through a wooden staircase on his way down, and the kid gets up like he fell out of bed. Aishwarya Rai spins around like a meth-fueled whirling dervish, dispatching a truly ridiculous number of enemies. Even senior citizen Ben Kingsley runs around kicking ass and taking names.
If you've never seen an action movie set in the Roman Empire before, you might find The Last Legion mildly entertaining. But if you've never seen an action movie set in the Roman Empire before, you should watch Gladiator, Spartacus, Ben-Hur and about a dozen other films before you even think of watching The Last Legion.