Confusing Low Budget Tale of Kings and Knights
As most film enthusiasts, not unlike myself, will be familiar with the name of Malcolm Mcdowell, so when we see it attached to a movie, we would perhaps give said flick a second glance, perhaps even go out on a limb to watch it with full knowledge it might be less than perfect. That is exactly what I did, poor fool me. The film poster looks impressive with the beautifully embossed sword and the text informing us “How the legend of Lionheart began”. In all honesty, I’m no expert on the subject but it’s the first story of Lionheart I’ve seen that tells it like this.
The acting is very wooden but I checked to see who done what on IMDb, as I didn’t recognise anyone but three of the actors. There is a reason for that. Every single actor except those mentioned, are complete rookies, which shows very badly. Don’t get me wrong, some show promise but I wanted to see a real film, not something that should never have had McDowell , Burton and Perez playing off of a large cast of first timers. A bad, bad choice for a pro, but as I’ve said before (and no doubt will again), there is a recession on and actors need to work, just like everybody else, so this will happen more and more, unfortunately, and it’s the less popular actors who will suffer, being forced (financially) to appear in these ultra low budget efforts. A damned shame in my not as humble as I should be opinion.
The bottom line is, bad acting, confusing story/plot, overused plot device (yes indeed, another 1000 year curse!), noticeably bad editing, poor choreography, certain scenes were dragged on unnecessarily, particularly at the end of each of them, to perhaps increase the running time. Lionheart actually appeared to have a decent team of set designers and effects people (for such a small budget), because some scenes looked great, and at the very start of the film, the whole curse scene looked almost convincing. I think they put loads of effort on the opening scenes, to suck us in and it worked. I really thought I would be seeing a good movie but…
Low budget indie fans may get something out of this, but unfortunately most won’t.
Grade: C- (4/10)
E Blackadder
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