BEOWULF
"Set in the future, this interpretation of the 8th-Century poem follows a powerful nomadic warrior on his noble quest to kill a flesh-eating fiend."
I remember reading about this movie in some film magazine when I was a teenager. The big screen adaptation of Mortal Kombat had recently been released and that film's producer, Lawrence Kasanoff, had moved on to a modestly budgeted adaptation of the epic poem Beowulf, set to star Christopher Lambert. I was familiar with the poem, I liked the Mortal Kombat movie, and I loved the Highlander franchise at the time, so this just seemed like an excellent idea to me.
Then I heard absolutely nothing else about this movie for over fifteen years. I discovered that it actually existed yesterday on Netflix and was overcome with a wave of nostalgia. I honestly didn't even know that the movie was ever finished, much less released in 1999. How did this Christopher Lambert movie, one I was actually looking forward to, slip through the cracks? Adrenalin: Fear The Rush certainly didn't slip through the fucking cracks, no matter how much I sometimes wish that it had.
This was exciting for me. Watching Beowulf this morning was like unwrapping a birthday present. I was anticipating this. I was not anticipating having to review this movie after I watched it.
The flavor text above claims that this movie takes place at some unspecified point in the future, but nobody ever brings that shit up at any point during the story. I have to assume it's a post-apocalyptic future, because it looks a lot like the Middle Ages, except for the abundance of serrated sword blades. It's like the film's prop master was obsessed with steak knives, and thought it would be really cool if steak knives were swords. He wasn't altogether wrong, for while these giant oar-shaped serrated swords may be entirely impractical, they do look kinda cool.
The plot begins as the legendary hero Beowulf arrives at the castle Heorot, represented onscreen as a shoddy digital effect superimposed over a gently sloping hillside. This castle is topped by a gigantic collapsible claw that spews fire from its fingertips, into the sky. I don't know what this means. Why would anybody ever build that? Is it a futuristic" touch? Is that the best they could come up with? It seems to serve no purpose.
Heorot is besieged by a gaggle of barbarians, surrounding the castle in an attempt, as their leader claims, to keep the evil within from escaping. Beowulf saves a refugee from Heorot from execution, tries to return her to Heorot, and she runs screaming back into the throng of barbarians, who immediately chop off her head as Beowulf watches, shocked. This lady really didn't want to go back to the "cursed" castle.
Heorot's leader is a fella named Hrothgar, who looks like a middle-aged man cosplaying as Maximilian Schell. His daughter Kyra (pronounced KAI-RAH) is played by Rhona Mitra, whose magnificent breast implants look distractingly out of place in this film. Nobody in a future this ugly and grimy should have breasts like that. Mac from Night Court is also there for a few minutes. Then Grendel kills him, and that's that.
Beowulf has arrived at Heorot because he has been called by the great evil lurking within its walls. It seems this film's version of the iconic hero is a little different from the others. Long ago, his mother had sex with a demon in a cave, and nine months later, baby Beowulf was born. As a result, Beowulf is at war with his own nature, wandering the world, slaying monsters that he tracks with his "devil sense", vowing never to succumb to the evil within himself as he rids the world of all manner of vile creature. He also has a healing factor, like a platinum-blonde Wolverine.
Unfortunately, he doesn't seem very good at the whole "monster slayer" thing, getting his ass kicked every time he fights a beastie in this movie, barely managing to survive these encounters. Eventually he does triumph over both Grendel and the monster's mommy (who boned Hrothgar and gave birth to Grendel, which made me wonder if perhaps Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary ripped off this little detail when they wrote their own adaptation of the poem), but by that point, literally everybody else in Heorot aside from Rhona Mitra (and her spectacular bosom) is dead.
He managed to save precisely one innocent life out of hundreds in the castle. And the castle exploded (for some reason) after they left it, too, just in case anybody managed to survive the previous bloodbath. So this Beowulf isn't very good at his chosen vocation and he should find something more constructive to do with the remainder of his cursed existence, because "fighting the good fight" and slaying demons seems to be doing more harm than good.
That's pretty much everything that happens in the movie. Beowulf shows up, makes the sex with Rhona Mitra, gets bullied by a pair of monsters, everybody dies, and a castle blows up. There are two very uncomfortable (and almost completely identical) scenes of Grendel's mother, her hair feathered to an obscene degree and wearing an outfit made out of those plastic soda bottle rings that kill all the fishies in the sea, visiting Hrothgar in his sleep, dry humping him with vigor as he dreams of his late wife committing suicide.
At the end of the movie, she transforms into one of the most atrociously rendered digital monsters I have ever seen in my life. The creature looks like some rejected monster concept from one of the UrotsukidÅji books. Come to think of it, this whole movie feels like a cheap adaptation of some forgotten manga. It's so weird, but that's the best way to describe it. The warriors all wear flashy, impractical armor and wield ridiculous looking swords and pikes with spinning saw blades mounted on their tips.
Beowulf dresses like he walked right out of an anime, with a big leather coat, a jumpsuit crisscrossed with pointless belts, his hair is dyed white, and his entire arsenal consists of goofy-looking weapons like a giant knife that launches a saw blade, a double-bladed grappling hook, a wrist-mounted, retractable machete, and a sword with a trigger guard protruding from its hilt.
Beowulf is the live-action adaptation of a stupid comic book that doesn't exist.
The music is overbearing, anachronistic techno garbage, co-composed by that asshole who co-founded Juno Reactor, a music collective whose efforts I despise. The near-constant bleeping and blooping of the soundtrack was slowly sapping my will to live as I watched the film, and after Beowulf had ended, all colors seemed like they had faded slightly, and the world had become a darker place.
The torture started with the opening title, shamelessly (and I mean shamelessly) ripping off the opening title from producer Kasanoff's Mortal Kombat, except it all looked and sounded so much cheaper and more annoying. I wanted to stop the movie as soon as it started, because I was so immediately turned off by the atrocious opening. It's that stupid. Good lord, it's all so stupid. There are maybe ten good minutes in this movie, and they're all separated by an ocean of mediocrity and noise
You broke my heart, Beowulf. You broke my heart.
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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