Pretty much all I can say is that the movie sucks as bad as the poster.
The Details
Released December 23, 2009 (which happens to be my birthday, which is even more insulting).
Starring James Purefoy and a whole bunch of other people who should have known better. Directed by Michael J. Bassett.
A mercenary devotes himself to a life of peace after he discovers his soul is damned, and then a bunch of shit happens.
The Plot (contains spoilers)
Solomon Kane is a big bad mercenary who kills a lot of people. We don’t really know why, he just does it. But then he runs into the Devil’s Reaper, who is not only really cliche and boring looking, he’s also got a voicetrack that is HEINOUSLY TOO LOUD. The Reaper tells Solomon that all of his looting and pillaging and killing has damned his soul, and the Devil wants his dues. So Solomon jumps out a window to escape, and takes refuge in a monastery for a year, until the good-for-nothing monks kick his ass out.
So he meets up with some nice Christian pilgrim folk who are headed to America, who happen to have a cute daughter, who happens to like Solomon. Surprise. And then the nice pilgrim folk get ambushed by some possessed bad guys working for an evil sorcerer named Malekai, and their daughter gets kidnapped because she’s Marked. With a capital M. Her dad makes Solomon swear to find their daughter, and tells him thath is soul will be redeemed should he save her life.
What happens after that is kind of a mishmash of bullshit. Lots of it. They don’t spoonfeed it to you, they back up the CAT rental and fucking bury you in it. Solomon has his crisis of faith, nearly gets fed to zombies by a preacher keeping them in a church basement, gets really drunk and bawls about this girl when he thinks she’s dead, gets fucking CRUCIFIED (WTF?), finds out the girl is ALIVE, and then fights his way into his childhood home to make up with his dad, kill his psychotic brother who he pushed off a cliff as a child, fight a raging hell-demon, and oh yeah, kill Malekai, get the girl, and have his soul redeemed.
What a fucking mess.
The Opinion
No amount of prettying up will save this piece of shit.
The only good thing about this movie was the CG on the hell-demon. And that was pretty terrible. This entire film is a raving mess of terrible acting (Purefoy talks like Christian Bale with his make-me-lips mouthguard in “The Dark Knight”, but with a horrific WTF-is-this accent), terrible writing, and overall terrible terribleness. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t suspenseful. It was utterly predictable trite that had me yawning 10 minutes in and begging for it to be over after half an hour.
Kane is an utterly forgettable character. He has nothing that attaches you to him, save for the first few minutes of the movie where he’s dual-wielding and killing folks left right and center like some badass World of Roguecraft character – that’s when you think “holy shit this guy is AWESOME”. Then he goes pansy-ass on us. His dialogue is so dumbed down, and so blank and pointless, that you spend more time laughing at the stupid shit coming out of his mouth than actually paying attention to what’s on the screen. The script seems to think that the audience is incapable of remember just how damned Kane’s soul is, because it reminds us every 10 minutes.
Every scene of the movie feels like it was filmed with no real intention for anything to flow, and then thrown together. And sometimes, it can work, and work well (look at “Doomsday”, which was fucking awesome and arguably 3 movies in 1), but in this case it leaves you going “wait, what?” half the time. Zombies? Seriously? And fucking crucifying people? WTF?
Oh god. I could go on for pages. All I’m going to say is, don’t watch it. Don’t. If you really want to watch a movie, watch “Valhalla Rising”. You won’t understand a single goddamn thing going on, but at least it’s brilliant.
