Some Lady, Some Lake
I should just say right up front that Aishwarya Rai walking up out of the river is worth nine bucks by itself.
Furthermore, The Last Legion is easily the least terrible of the late rash of sword-and-sandal films -- where Troy, Alexander, and King Arthur all battle for that coveted D- (and Troy, at least, ain't getting it), The Last Legion claws out a gentleman's C- by simply not aiming too high.
Seriously, who doesn't love a movie in which the "sudden but inevitable betrayal" happens three times? Or a movie that tries to re-create the Gatling-gun scene from Outlaw Josey Wales with a sweet-tastic hybrid between a scorpio and a Katyusha? Or a movie in which Aishwarya Rai kills like a zillion Ostrogoths with two different kinds of katar, while showing off what is supposed to be (and for all I know might actually have been) kalaripayit moves? (Aish totally name-checks it, too, while giving her origin story to a distracted-looking Colin Firth.)
Plus, barring a few muffins on the names (Ambrosius Aurelianus becomes Aurelius Antonius; Merlin goes through a garbled Geoffrey of Monmouth to become "Ambrosinus"), and a pointless moving of the date from 476 AD to 460, the movie's not impossibly inaccurate, except for the fact that the Ninth Legion (the titular "last legion" of the film) was all killed off by Germans and Jews 300 years before the movie happens, and the silly part about Julius Caesar's sword becoming Excalibur and so forth. (The movie is based on a hiccup in Gildas' De Excidio Britanniae, the aforementioned garbling of Geoffrey, and a novel I haven't read.) We don't have any dragons (Merlin's fake magic is actually kind of funny by the end of the film), but we do have an impressively scarred Darth Vortigern.
Colin Firth gives good world-weary, or possibly "why at this point in my career am I in a De Laurentiis movie Steve Reeves would have been proud of?", which contributes to the least-rousing Braveheart speech ever filmed, but it's nicely of a piece with all the toppled statuary and corroded columns everywhere. (The menhirs, though, are the fakest things I've seen outside a Doctor Who marathon.) Thomas Sangster does a fine pouty-imperious job as Romulus Augustus, Ben Kingsley wanders all over the West Country looking for his Merlin accent, and we've already covered the whole Aishwarya Rai issue. (And speaking of accents, apparently Ostrogothic accents sound very pirate-y. Lots of broad Somerset vowels and rolled Rs.)
Admittedly, we howled at the description of Tiberius hiding Excalibur to prevent it falling into evil hands (he's also described as "upstanding" or something else ludicrous), the notion of young R.A. bearing the "blood of Caesar" is nonsense (although I bet it was period nonsense, too), and Our Heroes seemingly cross the Alps solely to give us a LotR flashback and much giggling. One would like, someday, to see a film in which Roman soldiers actually fight like Roman soldiers, but admittedly by the 5th century, the Roman soldiers who were fighting weren't actually fighting like Roman soldiers anyhow.
So is it a good movie? By no means. Can you low-ball it into a good movie? With good will and a serious Aishwarya or Colin thing going on, you can easily get a good time out of it. And isn't that what people dressing up like Romans and whaling on each other with swords is all about? And besides, the world of cinema totally owed mollpeartree and myself for making us sit through that godawful Antoine Fuqua King Arthur slop.
Furthermore, The Last Legion is easily the least terrible of the late rash of sword-and-sandal films -- where Troy, Alexander, and King Arthur all battle for that coveted D- (and Troy, at least, ain't getting it), The Last Legion claws out a gentleman's C- by simply not aiming too high.
Seriously, who doesn't love a movie in which the "sudden but inevitable betrayal" happens three times? Or a movie that tries to re-create the Gatling-gun scene from Outlaw Josey Wales with a sweet-tastic hybrid between a scorpio and a Katyusha? Or a movie in which Aishwarya Rai kills like a zillion Ostrogoths with two different kinds of katar, while showing off what is supposed to be (and for all I know might actually have been) kalaripayit moves? (Aish totally name-checks it, too, while giving her origin story to a distracted-looking Colin Firth.)
Plus, barring a few muffins on the names (Ambrosius Aurelianus becomes Aurelius Antonius; Merlin goes through a garbled Geoffrey of Monmouth to become "Ambrosinus"), and a pointless moving of the date from 476 AD to 460, the movie's not impossibly inaccurate, except for the fact that the Ninth Legion (the titular "last legion" of the film) was all killed off by Germans and Jews 300 years before the movie happens, and the silly part about Julius Caesar's sword becoming Excalibur and so forth. (The movie is based on a hiccup in Gildas' De Excidio Britanniae, the aforementioned garbling of Geoffrey, and a novel I haven't read.) We don't have any dragons (Merlin's fake magic is actually kind of funny by the end of the film), but we do have an impressively scarred Darth Vortigern.
Colin Firth gives good world-weary, or possibly "why at this point in my career am I in a De Laurentiis movie Steve Reeves would have been proud of?", which contributes to the least-rousing Braveheart speech ever filmed, but it's nicely of a piece with all the toppled statuary and corroded columns everywhere. (The menhirs, though, are the fakest things I've seen outside a Doctor Who marathon.) Thomas Sangster does a fine pouty-imperious job as Romulus Augustus, Ben Kingsley wanders all over the West Country looking for his Merlin accent, and we've already covered the whole Aishwarya Rai issue. (And speaking of accents, apparently Ostrogothic accents sound very pirate-y. Lots of broad Somerset vowels and rolled Rs.)
Admittedly, we howled at the description of Tiberius hiding Excalibur to prevent it falling into evil hands (he's also described as "upstanding" or something else ludicrous), the notion of young R.A. bearing the "blood of Caesar" is nonsense (although I bet it was period nonsense, too), and Our Heroes seemingly cross the Alps solely to give us a LotR flashback and much giggling. One would like, someday, to see a film in which Roman soldiers actually fight like Roman soldiers, but admittedly by the 5th century, the Roman soldiers who were fighting weren't actually fighting like Roman soldiers anyhow.
So is it a good movie? By no means. Can you low-ball it into a good movie? With good will and a serious Aishwarya or Colin thing going on, you can easily get a good time out of it. And isn't that what people dressing up like Romans and whaling on each other with swords is all about? And besides, the world of cinema totally owed mollpeartree and myself for making us sit through that godawful Antoine Fuqua King Arthur slop.