Given his strengths, Centurion is probably Marhsall’s most disappointing and self-defeating entry yet. He has come up with a sword-and-sandal epic; a genre with an innate capacity to slide into ponderousness and pomposity, even as it tries to deliver bigger and badder action scenes. It’s a genre whose directors tend to shy away from humour, because of an innate desire to perhaps draw too-literal parallels to modern geopolitics (whatever the era) that forces them to want to take their material very, very seriously, even if their talents in such matters are far outweighed by the task at hand. Not everyone can write HBO’s Rome or BBC’s I Claudius.
Centurion takes place during the Roman occupation of Britain, where a fierce Pictish guerilla campaign under their King Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen) has been slaughtering the Roman occupation forces left and right. To finally put an end to this, Roman general Virilus (Dominic West) and his Ninth Legion enter the wilderness to clean out the Picts once and for all. An ensuing ambush and massacre in the forest leaves only a handful of survivors, led by Centurion Quintus (Michael Fassbender) who must strive to complete their mission: rescue their commander, and re-enter Roman territory.
Marshall punctuates his journey with visual flair: balls of fire rolling out of the Scottish woods and into a Roman formation, bodies littering the landscape, some still on fire, blossoms blowing in the wind as they fall from a tree, the stark beauty of the Scottish hills. Action sequences sadly fare less well; brutal but repetitive, they deaden rather than exhilarate. It doesn’t help also that his depiction of the Picts lacks any of the sense of awe, fright and mystery that real Romans regarding them must have: one would believe that they must have looked as intimidating to the Romans as Maoris or Zulus look to us today. Here, their face paint resembles that of a group of football fans heading for the home team game for Chelsea vs Roma FC at Stamford Bridge. I guess the screenwriters did not want to ruin the beauty of Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko, here playing a very dour Pictish tracker who is hunting the Romans down. Still really, better she look like a Zulu than a football fan when she puts on the blue woad dye.
Centurion is beautiful, brutal and boring. Its characters have few engaging points or details, the action is standard, and the political allegory is weak and obvious. One wishes Neal Marshall heads back making campy and audacious sci-fi and horror movies, which play to his obvious strengths. I like to believe that there are no B-list stories, just B-list treatments (the term “B-movie” being a derogatory term from the days when cinemas showed two feature films back to back, the second reel, the B-reel, being the less “respectable” one with lower budget and pulpier material.) and that it’s better to be lurid and funny and exciting, rather than ponderous, dull and “respectable”, any day.