newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Afghanistan meets Caledonia in "Centurion," the new swords-and-sandals-slipping-in-guts action movie from writer/director Neil Marshall.

This Magnolia Pictures release gets off like an arrow, flying over snow-clad Highlands to a lone man, shirtless and hands bound, bleeding from the chest as he runs across a field of white.

In voiceover, the lonely long distance runner, Centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), assures audience members just settling into their seats that this is neither the beginning nor the end of his story.

We are in the 2nd Century A.D., in the place more recently known as Scotland, and things have not been going well for Dias and his cohorts. This is a set-up that will be more familiar to viewers in the UK than to most Americans.

Just like modern soldiers, average Roman legionnaires were a polyglot bunch united by their limited prospects. They turned to jobs that let them travel to exotic lands on foot or in rickety boats, meet people of colorful cultures, and kill them.

With the occasional slip-up, the legions did that work well in Britain. But by repute, sometime around 117 A.D., the Ninth Legion marched north into Caledonia — and disappeared.

There is no hard evidence for this in the historical record, but there is also no definitive proof against it. All that's certain is that not long thereafter, the Emperor Hadrian traveled to Britain and decreed construction of a wall protecting the Romanized south from the "barbarian" north.

That leaves a lot of latitude for a writer-director dreaming up an action adventure and able to shoot in scenic Scottish forests, albeit on budget limited except for a vast investment in fog machines. With cinematography by Sam McCurdy, "Centurion" looks consistently beautiful, if eerie.

The same can be said for its best character, who certainly is not blank slate Dias. Instead, she's Etain, a tracker played by model-slash-actress Olga Kurylenko. Given what's ahead in "Centurion," that "slash" may be the best part of Kurylenko's background.

If you like split skulls, compete decapitations, arterial sprays, arrows in the eye and the occasional suddenly missing limb, "Centurion" is definitely for you. For the most part, Marshall makes the fight viscerally exciting, with brutality appropriate to the era. But at times, he simply enjoys viscera and brutality more than you will.

By the time Dias encounters Etain, he has already survived the slaughter of his frontier outpost and is being pursued by men in furs, accessorized with battle axes. They are Caledonians, members of the Celtic confederation known to the Romans as Picts, "painted people," from their blue war paint, woad.

In the nick of time, Dias is rescued by a Roman general and his men on reconnaissance, with Etain as their guide. Recognizing that they are not going to get much information from the surly Picts, they do the Roman thing and kill them.

And it's about this point where "Centurion" turns into a sequence of events borrowed not just from "Gladiator," but "The Last of the Mohicans," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and especially the recent revisionist "King Arthur."

That is best remembered for blue-hued Keira Knightley as a warrior princess running around wearing only a leather harness, and unable to fill even that. Kurylenko is considerably more conservatively dressed, realistic to the era and climate, although unaware that woad was not so much makeup as an antiseptic and coagulant useful for people wearing leather while swinging steel.

In one of Marshall's best conceits, Etain cannot speak because her tongue was ripped out by the people who raped her, killed her parents and burned their village. That not only finesses the effect of Kurylenko's possible line readings, but it leaves open the question of who committed those atrocities.

The erstwhile Bond girl communicates successfully through a hard stare brought straight from the catwalk. She calls it "blue steel." Despite her thin build and lack of small talk, Kurylenko makes Etain convincing as a relentless pursuer and remorseless fighter.

While Kurylenko remains silent, when it comes to linguistics, "Centurion" actually outdoes "The Passion of the Christ." Sure, Mel Gibson had his people talking Aramaic. Neil Marshall's cast speaks Pictish — a lost language. (Pictish is responsible for Aber- and Lhan- names in Scotland, and is believed to be close to Breton, providing the rationale here.)

The general who rescues Dias, at least for the moment, is played by Dominic West of "The Wire" with boisterous high spirits. He's a man's man, a manly man, one who enjoys the company of other men, drinking, brawling and so on. Just in case you miss the point, his name is Virilus.

Learning of the frontier attack from Dias, Virilus consults with Governor Julius Agricola (Paul Freeman). They agree the war is unwinnable, but one quick victory will enable them to declare the Latin version of "mission accomplished" or "peace with honor" and quickly retire as wealthy men.

So Virilus takes the Ninth Legion north, and Dias goes along. He is part of a group that includes an old guy, a young guy, a sneaky guy, a cooking guy, a black guy, a stand-in for Muslim guy from the Caucasus. Names? Uh, Grizzly, Peach Fuzz, Pete, Cookie, Token, Mohammed?

And like Marshall when it comes to character development, I'm going to call an abrupt end to plot points for this review.

By now, the question that occurs to a viewer is: why is all this necessary? Other than ambitious creeps, what Roman thought this was a good idea? Why did they keep sending their men into hard terrain, populated by tough people who wanted to be left alone? Aside from creating new enemies, what did they accomplish?

Perhaps they came for the waters.

In that sense, "Centurion" can be watched as an artifact of late empire. Marshall makes his Romans the good guys, as ill-conceived as that may be. Based on what's happening on the ground, they are more like the brave but ignorant thugs. Mistakes are made. Disasters follow. Collateral damage happens. Cover-ups are necessary.

"Centurion" has opened in New York and Philadelphia, and is available via cable on demand. It will soon be in general release in New Jersey. The visuals make it worth seeing in a theater. But for all its hard-edged action, it is stirring in a different way.

"Centurion" will leave you chanting: Romanorum cedunt nunc! Romans out now!

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it