Ben Foster stars as a Czech folk hero tasked with protecting a lady in the gory, muddled 'Medieval,' directed by Petr Jákl.
which plunged audiences into hyperrealistic and uber-violent battle scenes. Foster, who tends to disappear into his roles, approaches the bloodshed, and Jan’s emotional journey, with his typical ferocity.
The legendary Michael Caine, playing a character named Lord Boresh, takes us into the Kingdom of Bohemia at the turn of the 15th century, where chaos reigns, and it requires several frames of onscreen text and a voice-over to get us up to speed. Essentially, the plague has plunged Europe, and the Catholic Church, into chaos, and there are two popes: one in Rome and one in France.
Boresh hires Jan as a mercenary to kidnap Lady Katherine , the fiancee of Lord Rosenberg , a Sigismund ally. Katherine also happens to be the niece of the king of France. It’s a bit of political gamesmanship, and the rest of the film unfolds as a series of ambushes and double-crosses, mercenaries and peasants fighting to gain control of Katherine, who falls in love with her captor, Jan, and his honor.
“Medieval” is a film with an identity crisis, caught between its lowbrow sword-and-splatter charms and grander ambitions. As a quick and dirty 90-minute corker, it could have been a nice and nasty slice of genre filmmaking, but Jákl aims for something more epic in scope, and the film drags, easily 30 minutes too long. Not even the electrifying Foster is enough to zap some life into this tale of court intrigue and the resulting clash of warriors.
The clarity of message gets hopelessly bogged down in the internecine conflicts of all the players, the script utterly convoluted even though the film is essentially just a bunch of guys killing each other in the woods while a pair of brothers squabble over who gets to be king. What exactly Jan is fighting for feels dreadfully unclear, despite vague aphorisms like “honor, justice, freedom, faith, hope” intoned over the final frames. We’ll have to take their word for it.
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