Romans vs. Picts. History vs. Action.

There are few things higher on the list of things I love seeing in movies – but hope never to see in real life – than arterial sprays. When a carotid artery is lacerated on film and blood violently ejects and 75% of the audience sucks in air through their teeth, well, for some reason, I find this a thing of curious beauty.

The envelope-pushing British director Neil Marshall must agree with me, as his newest film, Centurion treats arterial sprays like Sex and the City treats shoes.

As Centurion opens it threatens to be a standard historical epic, elaborating on the fabled “lost Ninth Legion” that invaded North Britain never to return. When the first moments of action are a spear through the testicles and an arrow knocking a head into a bell, it literally sounds the tone of this film: ridiculous, over-the-top violence.

As pure action, Centurion works well. The cinematography is grainy and distinctive and the performers – Dominic West, Michael Fassbender and Olga Kurylenko – all look fabulous wielding weapons and destroying things. It’s this heavy style, however, that prevented me from ever taking the movie seriously.

Centurion pays lip service to concepts of duty, honor and betrayal, but it is hard to let these cartoonish characters under your skin. “Many good people died,” intones an exhausted man at the end of the film. Really? I didn’t see any.

There are trace elements of subversive themes in this film which are there, I think, to lead the audience to question where their sympathies lie. Are the invading Romans good? Shouldn’t we be siding with the Picts, trying to defend their land?  Somewhere buried in the frenzied editing, bombastic music and blood might be some Verhoeven-ish concepts of Empire and Heroism.  Yet, instead of character or historical introspection we get seven more arterial sprays.

Then again, I signed up for arterial sprays, so I shouldn’t be complaining.

There is a stretch in the second act where the movie becomes a stripped-down chase story. (Indeed, there is an explicit references to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that works nicely.) Had Marshall stayed with a straight through line and focused more on this feeling of dread, as he did in his near-masterpiece The Descent, I think we’d have a much more successful movie. As it is now, it is a confused historical film that doesn’t know what it wants to say but is, luckily, still a lot of fun.