The idiot (2/23/01)
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The Thirteenth Warrior. [John McTiernan, 1999.]
Court poet Antonio Banderas is making the best of the Dark Ages partying in Baghdad until he hits on the right woman at the wrong moment and finds it politically expedient to take a roving ambassadorship that dispatches him to the distant North, where fickle Chance — nay, inscrutable Fate — appends him to a band of Vikings on a quest; despite a certain amount of fraternity hazing, he learns their language with uncanny rapidity and impresses them with his skill with horse and sword, and has been accepted as one of the boys by the time they arrive at their destination, where an anonymous tribe of — protoBritons? — face an apparently supernatural menace.
The trailers never did this justice: an essay in action in the age of
Beowulf [a reminder, perhaps, that the medieval sagas were the action movies of their day];
Conan with a forebrain. Check it out.
____________Talkin’ ’bout my trepanation (2/19/01)
