Centurion (2010)

Centurion unfolds when the Roman Ninth Legion are decimated in a devastating guerrilla attack. Faced with overwhelming odds a splinter group, who survived the attack, must defy the odds and fight their back to safety from behind enemy lines.

Overall Review Score

2.5 out of 10

Review

While loosely based around the massacre of the Ninth Legion in Caledonia, Centurion is a 2010, 93-minute, film that struggles to entertain the audience from its opening scene. The actors, including Michael Fassbender who plays Centurion Quintus Dias and Noel Clarke who plays Macros a Greek refugee from Numidia, talk in low hushed whispers and are thoroughly unconvincing in their portrayal of a decimated Roman cohort struggling to get back to safety. Their one-dimensional characters – including the brave and noble Centurion set on completing the mission at all cost, the ‘in it for himself’ Greek, the cook turned axe killer and the slave turned gladiator - offer nothing new and quickly serves to only alienate the audience. While their ludicrous plan of going further into enemy lines to escape rather than taking a quicker, shorter, and probably more entertaining, alternative will have the audience on the verge of switching off completely from this disastrous film. Away from the cat and mouse game, the film tries to increase momentum and tension through short, quick-paced fight scenes. However, whether because they are too few, are surrounded by unnecessary dialogue and or take place in blend open countryside sets, the fight scenes come across as formulaic, ill timed and unnecessarily violent. They fail to add anything to the film to the point if they were removed the audience would not miss them. Overall, Centurion is a film of missed opportunity. It could have been good but its slow, clunky and dialogue heavy script coupled with unconvincing characters, poor fight sequences and a strangely bizarre cat and mouse, turned romance, plot caused the film to fail. There are plenty of much better Roman Empire related films on the market; audiences should watch those before even considering watching Centurion.

Reviewer 1's score & comments:

Score: 2 out of 10

Comments:

Centurion tries to be ambitious in both style and tone, as it tries to deliver some visually stunning set pieces, a compelling storyline with a romance sub plot and nicely choreographed action sequences that would depict the carnage seen on the battlefield. However, what is actually delivered in the films 93-minute runtime is a rudimentary cat and mouse story, as the remnants of the Romans 9th Legion must avoid detection by the enemy tracker Etain, a barely existent romance subplot and terrible voice acting by the main cast. The only thing that stopped me from dozing off during this film was its action sequences, which really encapsulated the gory battlefield,but even these could not distract from the films earlier failings.

Reviewer 2's score & comments:

Score: 3 out of 10

Comments:

Centurion is a film that so easily could have been good. It had all the premises of a decent Roman story – vast armies, large open spaces, a clever and unrelenting enemy, and slaves turned gladiators. However, Centurion crumbled quicker than Julius Caesar did on the Ides of March. While the film did have some noteworthy moments, such as, its romance sub-plot, the majority of the film felt formulaic and contained nearly every Roman stereotype and cliché imaginable. All the actors, especially Noel Clarke and Michael Fassbender, put on sub-par performances that drained all the momentum from the film, which made me conclude that if Mark Anthony had seen it he would have said, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears for Centurion is so poor upon watching it you will agree it’s a bore.”

#action #drama #michaelfassbender #noelclarke