CENTURION (2010 - Cert 15)

Neil Marshall knows how to do violence. Dog Soldiers was a smashing debut and fantastic take on the Werewolf tale, pitting the British army against a family of lycanthropes, The Descent was a brilliantly claustrophobic horror film involving a girls weekend away caving and Doomsday, the story of a Scotland walled off after the outbreak of a virus but now locked in civil war, was a darkly violent mess of a film. I suppose it was only a matter of time before he went back in time and had a crack at the Roman era and a sword and sandals epic.



With his previous efforts Neil Marshall has managed to carefully straddle the thin line between naff and cult. He somehow managed to make genre films that were clearly influenced by the work of others, even nodding and referencing at times, but layer them with something original, something that gave them a bit of something extra. So it's even more disappointing that he lazily cobbles together a plot which has massive elements of Gladiator (revenge, blah, blah) and then combines it with the surviving resistance strand of 300. Effectively, he decides to make a film as a British, cult, homage to those two films but decides to just rip the stories off completely.

He gets together quite a cast as well. All sorts of British talent. Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Noel Clarke, David Morrissey and Riz Ahmed. All playing varying types of soldier with different levels of fighting skill, but none of which have anything interesting to do whatsoever other than killing or maybe dying in an interesting way. Fassbender is the closest we have to a character, bit of conflict here, an angry look into the distance there. Not exactly The King's Speech. The ace up his sleeve is Olga Kurylenko as a female Pict warrior. The inclusion of a seemingly indestructible female lead is meant to be that bit of something extra. It offers nothing though, not a sausage (no pun intended - ok, maybe it was).

I shouldn't spend too much time worrying about plot  and acting though, because it's not exactly the biggest draw of this sort of film. It's the action, the blood, the gore. How does Centurion fare in this department? Well if that's what your after it does it very well. The action is as you would expect, frenetic editing of swords, axes, arrows and any other type of weapon you can imagine thrashing about cutting through flesh. There's a good scene that heralds the introduction of rolling fireballs to the compendium of tools at the disposal of Romans. The gore quota is also met well, squelchy sounds and claret flying everywhere satisfy those needs more than adequately. The truth is though that this isn't nearly enough. Decapitation and dismembered limbs aren't enough to make up for a distinct lack of everything else. It's all just so boring.....lacking. My concentration wavered constantly. It's only 97 minutes long, that should not be happening.

I've asked myself why Centurion is so different from Marshall's other films, both Dog Soldiers and The Descent are essentially the same, people striving for survival against the odds. With lots of violence. I've not been able to answer that question though, but there is definitely something missing, an edge, a soul, I don't know, I could throw a collection of other pretentious words at it, it might just be the absence of Sean Pertwee dying in a horrendous manner, but whatever is missing Marshall needs to find it because as the budgets are getting bigger he's losing something.

Not even worth watching when you get home from the pub drunk with a kebab.