I saw this yesterday with my company. I'd give it a C.
Good:
- Art direction
- No surprises here, it's a pretty thing to look at
- Gerard Butler and Rodrigo Santoro
- Good casting here
- Gerard broadcasts presence and weight just by appearing on the screen
- Rodrigo comes off truly despicable and you want him dead from the moment he first appears on the screen
Bad:
- One dimensional characters
- Which means I don't really care when they die
- Don't give me the "It's just an action movie" bit - good action movies have good characters with development, which makes the action mean something:
- Compare the head choppin' moment of this film with say that of Aargon's final slice in 'Fellowship of the Ring'
- Silly script
- In any movie less stylized the whole affair would devolve into unintentionally funny camp
- This is probably more of a problem with the faithfulness to the source material but the whole mysticism vs. logic contrast in the two cultures is delivered in pretty clunky fashion
- Particularly the last line of the movie - yuk
- Highly played out film editing techniques
- While I like the idea of slowing down the motion on frames taken straight from the graphic novel...
- ... I am sick and tired of the slow down, speed up bullshit I've seen in about five million car commericals up to this point
- And really this technique hides the fact that few of the action moments are truly unique or memorable (the wall of dead dudes attack excluded) - there's just a whole lot of severing and poking going on
- Contrast this with Kill Bill where I'm sure each of you could rattle off about at least a dozen memorable scenes from the movie
So yeah. It was okay.