This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 11, 2011 - Among the multitude of problems with "The Eagle," a dumb war movie set in 2nd century Britain, is the difficulty of identifying with the hero. It's not just that Alabama-born Channing Tatum ("G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra") is the least believable ancient Roman since Tony Curtis graced "Spartacus" with his Bronx accent. The movie also suffers from what might be called the fallacy of the untenable hero. Rooting for the Romans to overcome the tribes of Britain on British soil is like rooting for Lord Cornwallis to beat Gen. Washington at Yorktown, or rooting for the U.S. cavalry to defeat the Sioux in the Black Hills.
Oh. We do? Yeah, well, John Ford didn't direct "The Eagle."
It's 140 AD, and the Roman empire extends all the way up to the middle of Britain. The northern boundary is marked by a wall built by the emperor Hadrian to hold back the barbarians (now called Scots). Twenty years before, the tribes defeated Rome's Ninth Legion, apparently killing all the legionnaires in the process, and captured the golden eagle they carried as a standard.
Marcus (Tatum), the son of the commander of the defeated legion, takes charge of a Roman outpost near Hadrian's wall. He is determined to win back his father's honor by traveling north and repossessing the eagle. He sets out on horseback, accompanied only by a slave (Jamie Bell), who owes Marcus his life.
After a lengthy journey through the forbidding Scottish highlands, Marcus and the slave come upon a tribe of barbarians. They look sort of like the humanoid creatures in "Avatar," without the tails. They cover their bodies in blue woad and on special occasions get drunk on mead to the point of orgiastic ecstasy.
One night, while the barbarians are busy doing whatever unspeakable things it is they do when drunk - the scenes are very dimly lit, like much of the movie, but there appears to be nude dancing and stuff - Marcus and the slave, ever loyal, grab the standard and head south for Hadrian's Wall. The barbarians eventually wake up and, shaking off their hangovers, give chase.
The movie, which is based on an historical novel by Rosemary Sutcliff, has terrible dialogue, and only Donald Sutherland, as Marcus's kindly uncle, seems able to make the words sound like actual human speech. Also, the action and battle scenes are shot in intense close-up with fast, blurry cutting, and it is usually impossible to figure out who is doing what to whom. If you care.
"The Eagle" is a bad movie. The only reason I have written so much about it, other than the fact that I seem to have gotten wound up, is that the director, Kevin Macdonald, has made a couple of very good movies - "Touching the Void" and "The Last King of Scotland."
Ditto the cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle - "Slumdog Millionaire" and "127 Hours."
They should have stayed away from "The Eagle."
Opens Friday, Feb. 11
'Barney's Version'
In the best scene in "Barney's Version," a decidedly uneven movie set mostly in and around Montreal, Canadian film producer Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti) flees his wedding reception to pursue another woman (Rosamund Pike), having fallen in love with her at first sight across a champagne glass.
That's the kind of thing Barney will do, and for a while watching him do it is entertaining. Barney can be a funny man, smart, outspoken and comically short-sighted, maddening and (occasionally) endearing. Eventually, though, as we explore more of Barney's life (three marriages, all of which he screws up) and work (he mostly makes trashy television shows) he becomes less entertaining and grows more tiresome. Barney's impulsive and mostly selfish decisions, once unpredictable, become all too predictable.
"Barney's Version" was based on a novel by the Montreal writer Mordecai Richter ("The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz") and directed by "CSI" veteran Richard J. Lewis. Paul Giamatti invests much of his considerable talent in his portrayal of Barney, and Dustin Hoffman is terrific as Barney's irreverent policeman father, but we lose interest in Barney as a comic figure as the story proceeds and he keeps hitting the same notes. And then, when sardonic, self-lacerating comedy turns to melodrama and then to tragedy, we are ill-prepared to take Barney as seriously as the filmmakers take him.
Opens Friday, Feb. 11
Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, is a special contributor to the Beacon.