The 13th Warrior Rating: * (out of * * * *) Reviewed by George Lau
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Omar Sharif, Diane Venora, Vladimir Kulich, Dennis Storhøi, Maria Bonnevie, Mischa Hausserman, Sven Wollter, John DeSantis, Asbjørn Riis Director: John McTiernan (with re-shoots directed by Michael Crichton) Producer: John McTiernan, Michael Crichton, Ned Dowd Screenplay: William Wisher and Warren Lewis based on the novel "Eaters of the Dead" by Michael Crichton Cinematographer: Peter Menzies Jr. Editor: Music: Jerry Goldsmith Running Time: 102 minutes MPAA Classification: R (Violence, bloody carnage, headless bodies)
"The 13th Warrior" comes at the end of as summer where we've already experienced man eating sharks ("Deep Blue Sea"), man eating crocodiles ("Lake Placid") and even a man hunting witch ("The Blair Witch Project"). Now, "The 13th Warrior" presents a tribe of flesh eating men who believe that they are bears.
The story, if that's what you want to call it, follows Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan (Antonio Banderas) an Arabian poet who falls in love with his king's wife and is banished from his home land. He then travels to the land of the Vikings and becomes an Ambassador to them. Eventually the Vikings are called upon to protect the people of the village who are being hunted by the flesh eating men. Thirteen warriors are chosen to go on the mission, and as you guessed it, Ahmed is chosen as the thirteenth. He's not a warrior, and at first not well accepted by the Vikings, but as the movie advances he'll have to prove himself both on and off the battlefield.
That's basically the entire plot. There is also a romantic subplot that has been so badly mishandled and, one assumes, drastically cut that you begin to wonder why the filmmakers didn't just edit out all of the scenes attaining to that part of the story. Instead they chose to leave just enough of those scenes in to annoy the viewer.
The film is basically non- stop action and when it pauses and tries to develop a story it becomes a laughing stock. The battle scenes, although well choreographed, are not involving and not the least bit exciting. We don't get to know any of the characters and so we don't care who lives and who dies. The film, which wants to be Beowolf, comes across more as a failed action-adventure story aspiring to epic proportions but not achieving it on any levels.
It was directed by John McTiernan who's, "The Thomas Crown Affair" is also playing in theaters currently. And it's not that McTiernan worked simultaneously on both films but that, "The 13th Warrior" was placed on the shelf for so long with the studio just waiting for a time to dump it on audiences. It belongs back on the shelf.
Copyright 1999 George Lau
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