Description
One of the year's biggest flops, albeit of the variety that passes completely under the radar such is the public's complete lack of interest in it, The Last Legion turns out to be fairly engaging old-fashioned hokum that lacks the star-power it needs to drive it or the vision behind the cameras to elevate the material. In many ways it's a throwback to producer Dino De Laurentiis' early 50s peplum like Attila the Hun rather than his more cerebral epics like Barabbas. Set during the final fall of the Roman Empire to the Goths and linking the myth of Excalibur with the legendary lost Ninth Legionmore… that inspired many a historical fiction but which many modern historians now believe was simply an accounting error and probably only existed on paper, it sees Colin Firth's general trying to save Thomas Sangster's child emperor in a chase that leads from the sacked city of Rome to the very end of the Empire at Hadrian's Wall with a little help from Aishwarya Rai's warrior woman and Ben Kingsley's teacher with a neat line in magic tricks. Things take a turn for the silly in Britannia with the introduction of a rather bland gold masked villain in a film that already has several bad guys, but it all rallies for a big final battle that, while it doesn't exactly set a new benchmark for screen action and could do with a lot more panache, has an almost pleasingly old-fashioned feel to it.
While it's all another take on the supposed Roman roots of the King Arthur legend, at least it doesn't subject us to leading players as painfully dire and hopelessly disengaged as Clive Owen and Keira Knightley in Antoine Fuqua's otherwise more enjoyable King Arthur: Firth and Rai may be distinctly B-Ark casting, but at least they show signs of having a pulse and deliver more than competent performances even if they lack the genuinely epic quality the film cries out for. Firth in particular seems surprisingly at home as an experienced soldier, finally seeming to have got rid of that constant look of mild indigestion that plagued so many of his earlier big screen performances.
Whereas in the old days the Romans in epics were cast almost exclusively from the ranks of English actors, in this case it's the Scots who seem to be running the Empire with the likes of John Hannah and Iain Glenn pulling the strings, though matters are somewhat confused by the fact that the Goths are also all played by Scots like Kevin McKidd and Peter Mullan. In fact the Scots are everywhere in the cast list, as if the casting director got a job lot of them cheap. Just to pile on the curiosity factor, Ben Kingsley - sorry, SIR Ben Kingsley, as he is billed in the end credits - engagingly overplays his part with a Welsh accent despite his character hailing from somewhere in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall (which would, if historical accuracy were a factor, have given him an Irish accent at that time).
It goes without saying from the prominent billing of Harvey Scissorhands on the credits that the Weinsteins have been at the film with the shears, though here it seems more in an attempt to secure a PG rating than losing anything that really affects the narrative - there's a curious tendency to cut away whenever a major character is killed which isn't helped by some rather average staging of the action scenes. Although supposedly healthily budgeted (with Dino, experience has shown that it's never a good idea to believe the films really cost anywhere near as much as he claims), the film boasts so many producers and credited writers that you get the impression that they ate up a fair portion of the budget before a single shot was ever filmed, leaving the crowd scenes less populated than they should be for a self-respecting epic. Unfortunately director Doug Lefler draws attention to the problem and shows his straight-to-video credentials with his lack of the all-important extreme long shots that epics demand even in the scenes where he has enough extras, leaving the film short on memorable imagery. This is certainly one of the few epics you feel won't lose anything being seen on the small screen instead of the big one.
But it's hard to really dislike in its old Saturday matinée style: it more or less does exactly what it sets out to do without having any pretensions to being anything more profound or meaningful. And how can you not love a film that ends with a sword in the stone and Boyo Benny's Merlin asking a child "Arthur, Arthur, Arthur, Arthur, hahve ay evah ly-ed two ewe?"
| Colin Firth |
| Ben Kingsley |
| Peter Mullan |
| Kevin McKidd |
| John Hannah |
Info:
- Category:
- Movies > Films
- Case Type:
- DVD
- Release Type:
- Retail
- Language:
- English
- Region:
- R1
- Format:
- Widescreen
- Comments:
- 1 read add
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Cover Info:
- Title:
- The Last Legion (2007) WS R1 Retail DVD
- Part:
- Front
- Dimensions:
- 3240 x 2175 px
- Size:
- 1,542 KB
- Downloads:
- 836 (1 today)
- Uploaded:
- 15/12/07 by pw1965
- Quality Rating:
-
- Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
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Rated 3.5 of 5 (3 votes). Click CDs to vote!
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