The 13th Warrior
Loud, clumsy, and laborious, “The 13th Warrior” is a film that asks too much and delivers too little. It arrives at the end of summer, a time Hollywood uses as a dumping ground for their leftovers and dogs. They don’t call this period the “dogs days of summer” for nothing.
“The 13th Warrior” is a dog, one obviously incapable of learning new tricks. It performs all the usual dog tricks like running and barking, but then it just lays there and licks itself. The film becomes nothing more than a $90 million mutt.
The film’s pedigree is impressive, with a long lineage of champions in the mix. There’s director John McTiernan, who knows how to pump up the action. The film is based on an early Michael Crichton novel called “Eaters of the Dead,” the film’s original and more appropriate title. The film stars Antonio Banderas, who flexed his action film muscles in last year’s “The Mask of Zorro.”
So why is this film such a bitch? The film doesn’t roll over and play dead, but it bites. It bites big time, but not in a positive way.
The film asks way too much, including accepting Banderas as a 10th Century Arab poet named Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan who stumbles across an encampment of Vikings and ends up joining them in defending their village against flesh eating mutants.
Even though Banderas is a Norse of a different color, you never once believe he’s Arabic. The filmmaker’s believe that tossing an old “Lawrence of Arabia” headdress on him makes him Arabic. There’s a scant trace of an accent, but it sounds more like an acting class assignment.
Banderas isn’t bad as Ahmed, but he’s trapped in a film that has very little personality to begin with. Almost everything in “The 13th Warrior” has been lifted from other films, including “The Seventh Samurai,” “The Clan of the Cave Bear” and “The Time Machine.”
Director McTiernan and writers William Wisher and Warren Lewis confuse larger than life with epic, and have delivered a film that is big but not epic. They’re more concerned with the action than the actors, and the results are disastrous. The film features numerous battle sequences, but they’re so confusing they become nothing more than chaos.
It’s hard to care about the outcome when we don’t care about the characters, and they’re so thinly drawn a light breeze would carry them away. The actors don’t really play characters but types: the brave one, the funny one, the macho one, the sexy one. Most of the Vikings are played by blonde men who tend to look like each other except during the film’s few quiet moments.
“The 13th Warrior” has very few quiet moments, and even then, they are nothing more than feeble attempts. There’s a totally unnecessary attempt at romance between Banderas and co-star Diane Venora, an actress who deserves better. The chummy moments between the guys feel more like a Dark Ages frat party than serious bonding.
Anyone with a moderate interest in film will recognize the plot devices from other, much better films. The 13 warriors come to the aid of a small village being terrorized by a band of marauding monsters. Sounds like “The Seven Samurai” (or “The Magnificent Seven”) to me. The creatures wear bear outfits and make grunting noises, just like in “Clan of the Cave Bear.”
The creatures also come out of their underground caves when the fog rolls in to eat the flesh of the living. Can someone say Morlock from “The Time Machine”?
The film is vicious, with lots of decapitations and impalements, yet McTiernan’s style is to throw everything in front of the camera and pray for the best. I understand his attempt to make battle as chaotic as it is in real life, yet the battles here are so dark and cluttered that they have no resonance.
Jerry Goldsmith’s musical score doesn’t help matters, a bombastic experience if ever there was one. Talk about overemphasis, another case where bigger wasn’t better.
“The 13th Warrior” has set on the shelf for over a year while McTiernan and Crichton argued over the final cut. I’m not sure if the final effort was a result of tampering, or if these two men just made a crappy film. Either way, this film doesn’t have to roll over and play dead. It was D.O.A.
THE 13TH WARRIOR
Antonio Banderas, Vladimir Kulich, Diane Venora, Dennis Storhoi, Omar Sharif in a film directed by John McTiernan. Rated R. 103 Minutes.
LARSEN RATING: $2
