They couldn't have tried harder and it shows

Rating: 5/10 (15 May 2004)

this movie was really bad.
forget the liberties with the story line. forget the acting.
for two and a half hours i watched actors doing their best blue steel in cheesy kung-fu movie style close-ups, while reciting some of the worst lines every put to paper. the failure of this movie is that it tried too hard. it tried to be great in too many ways and as a result failed in all of them.
they tried to make each line spoken the "they can never take our freedom speech", they tried to tell every side of every story, they even tried to hire a bunch of cast members from Lord of the rings, Braveheart and even the X-man movies in hopes to create a hit. what they got was a pompous self involved movie that's boring and sucks. (kinda like this review..but i'll go on anyway)
what this movie really needed was a good editor. then they could have taken all the good parts and put them together into a nice 30 minute version, saving everyone a lot of time.
kudos to the actors for giving their best despite horrible directing. i felt that the scenes of hector defending his pathetic brother Paris would make a great metaphor for bana trying to salvage this pathetic script with a decent performance nevertheless.
i was really hoping to love this movie and see something really unique. but not only did it fail to live up to it's potential, it sits well below other movies of its genre... braveheart, gladiator, last of the Mahicans. i place it somewhere below "robin hood prince of thieves" and Mel Gibson's "the patriot", and just above "messenger" milla jovovich's joan of arc nightmare.
maybe they'll get it right on the "odyssey...or the Aenied (note the way they set that up in the end)"
here's to dodgeball being the best movie of the year.