Cheesy poof!

Rating: 3/10 (21 August 2008)

I was just watching this movie fifteen minutes ago, and it almost left me speechless. Not because Ben Kingsley's in it. By now, everybody should know that his "Gandhi" days are long past forgotten and after starring in "Blood Rayne", I've come to expect the worst of him. Also not because it contains some of the most hilarious bad acting since "Indiana Mutt and the Crystal Numbskull." No, it was because this movie simply is the perfect embodiment of processed cheese, gleefully smeared on a screen. And as always with those genetically faked all-natural ingredients, it has you wondering if it really DID taste better the last time you ate it ...
To the point, about everything in here is totally, unbelievably cheesy: the action, because obviously no one bothered to make it look half way serious (Where's that damn stunt coordinator Mel Gibson hired for "Braveheart" when you need him?), the costumes, because one couldn't help but notice how embarrassingly cheap they were, the pee-pee-poor dialogue uttered by characters cut out of a wet cardboard box still dripping with script-writers urine, a plot straight outta development hell, where you can see the final twist coming from a dozen Galaxys far far away... And did I mention the whole let's-just-pretend-it's-acting yet? Colin Firth (who is arguably the lead character) plays his part like he's not paid enough to care, above mentioned Ben Kingsley auto-delivers some corny Gandalf ripoff which could've made the whole "Lord of the Rings" trilogy fail miserably (provided they had him using the same ridiculously fake blue beard), and Miss Rai ... well, let me say she's a beauty to behold, until she remembers why she's on screen in the first place. And if I tell you now that she's the single one character in this (supposedly heroic action-)movie who gets all the best fighting scenes, it should tell you something about what's considered "best" here. But at least, you can see she's used to moving her butt from all these dancing classes and stuff, but the others all look like they could't fight their way out of their own underpants unless threatened at gunpoint by Samuel L. Jackson, demanding his entrance fee back ... but okay, let's just be merciful and pretend this never happened. BTW, there were some more once-famed-for-I-dunno-what actors in the cast, but I completely forgot about their completely unmemorable performances as soon as they left the screen.
Bottom line is, one could easily smite this as a cheap and loveless medieval / fantasy hybrid for mental midgets which pretends to have something in common with "Gladiator" while dressing up as a dim-witted Hobbit, but if you're into unintentionally droll movies like "Battlefield Earth", you'll only be half disappointed that you rented this boredom-steaming pile of turd and not "300" again. On the other hand, if you're still twelve years old and therefore in the target audience, you might enjoy this flick anyway, but that's plain because you don't know any better.