The Big Whatsit

In the absence of anything about The Last Legion held within the vaults of Film Journal, it falls to me to comment on this deeply flawed yet not entirely unworthy offering. Considering its rather epic budget ($67m, which isn’t exactly Titanic, but decent spending by most people’s standards) and the largely British cast, the movie limped on to screens in the UK in a way that was almost apologetic. Derided by critics, ignored by audiences, it left just as quickly, and no doubt the studio will be wringing its hands over the DVD market’s prospects.

Some films just don’t make it, I guess, and TLL isn’t anyone’s idea of a classic. Its attention to historical detail is only as accurate as the plot demands. Some of the casting decisions are bizarre, and so much story is packed into 100 minutes of celluloid that swathes of plot rush by at a frankly bewildering pace. At heart though, it doesn’t aim to be anything more than an action adventure flick that happens to be set in antiquity, and on those terms it’s actually solid entertainment. Its basic premise is to suggest the origins of King Arthur, and this it achieves in a far more satisfying way than the pompous and terrible 2004 movie, King Arthur.

Our story begins as Rome is about to be sacked by Gallic barbarians. We’re introduced to Romulus Augustus (Thomas Sangster), a child destined to be the next Emperor, and also to Aurelius (Colin Firth), the soldier whose job it becomes to protect him. Ben Kingsley is Ambrosinus, Romulus’s tutor, whilst Kevin McKidd is on hand as the main baddie, a hooded barbarian who plays basically the same character as in Rome, only here he’s batting for the opposition. Anyway, Lucius Vorenus Wulfila helps his chief (played by traditional heavy, Peter Mullan) put the city to the torch and capture Romulus. The Gauls realise they can’t kill their young prisoner, so he’s exiled to Capri. Aurelius follows, along with Mira, a Byzantine warrior who, in a colourful example of casting, is Bollywood princess, Aishwarya Rai. The plot follows our heroes from the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire northwards, and eventually to Britain, just in time to kick start the Arthurian legend. The latter incidentally, is founded largely on a sword uncovered by Romulus, which was built for Julius Caesar, can slice through just about anything, and is clearly going to end up becoming Excalibur. Tenuous? Just a tad, but there’s a glimmer of logic leading up to this point if you follow it closely.

Given the summary above, it’s little wonder that the plot skips lightly over background events. The film has to cover Rome’s fall, political intrigues over the Empire’s future and its conclusion in Britain, which should offer enough material for a mini series, or at least double its existing running time. Instead, it can do nothing but hang on to the coat-tails of its main characters as they charge from one location to the next. Bits of it don’t make a lot of sense, and there’s next to nothing in terms of character development, simply because there isn’t time to get to know our heroes. We never figure out, for instance, what motivates Aurelius to honour his guardianship of Romulus once the Roman Empire has disintegrated around him. Why Mira goes with him is a mystery. The reason for the action shifting to Britannia isn’t explained in anything like sufficient detail, and why Wulfila pursues doesn’t make much sense either. It appears this is one of those movies where characters take action, choose their sides and so on through an innate sense of goodness or because they’re a wrong ‘un, and that’s it. That might have been fine if TLL was made in the 1960s, but I think the 21st century audience expects a little more than that. Contrast this with, say, Lord of the Rings, where it’s made absolutely clear where the characters are coming from and what makes them tick.

TLL contains some of the worst examples of casting I have witnessed in a long while. Perhaps its biggest crime is to install Colin Firth as a kind of proto-Aragorn hero. Mr D’Arcy works hard and tries his best, but he never looks like fleshing out the role, one that cries out for someone with the presence of Viggo Mortensen or Russell Crowe. Rai fares better as our heroine for the evening. She’s never called on to act, but in the fight scenes – and there’s lots of them – she has more than enough grace and poise to make short work of her lumbering opponents. Elsewhere, her role demands only that she looks pretty, something she can do effortlessly. Goodness knows what Sir Ben of Kingsley is doing – his character is so badly drawn that it’s all the award winning thesp can do to retain his dignity whilst hitting people with his stick or practising sorcery. McKidd phones in his performance – he deserves a lot better. And then there’s Sangster, around whom the entire story hangs. Can he carry off the role of young Caesar, showing the steel that already resides inside the body of a child? Sadly not. Sangster spends most of his time looking a bit bemused by what’s going on, which is fair enough considering the number of plot holes, narrative threads that just disappear, and being saved by a gang that includes Gandhi, Mark Darcy and her off of Bride and Prejudice.

Any movie based in ancient times needs to be underpinned by fairly bottomless pockets, lashings of cash used principally on lavish sets and healthy dollops of CGI. TLL is at its best when offering location shots. Hadrian’s Wall looks wonderfully authentic, and a pre-sacked Rome is well rendered, particularly from the vantage point of a colossal imperial statue upon which Romulus climbs. Elsewhere, it takes a turn for the worse. A scene that is supposed to show the passing of the seasons whilst ‘Excalibur’ remains embedded in its stone sheaf is far too ambitious. As the sword ‘weathers’ and the landscape passes from summer to autumnal rains to snowy winter, etc, the animation looks exactly like what it is – a detailed but wholly unrealistic cartoon, one that’s so obviously artificial that you wish they hadn’t bothered with it in the first place. Other scenes suggest that though TLL’s effects department can produce nice backdrops and cityscapes, when something is actually required to move (e.g. a Gaul falling from the battlements of Capri) the CGI is lacking. Though I have no idea whether the price tag on a movie affects the quality of its special effects in these days when everything is done via the click of a mouse, I get the impression that TLL was done slightly on the cheap, and that they ran out of money where producing some truly impressive CGI might have helped. The overall effect isn’t helped by a script in which no one says anything that isn’t a cliché, or A STATEMENT, and music that never really stops, whilst at the same time producing nothing of note despite fiddling away endlessly in the background.

Given the above, you would be forgiven for thinking that, like most of the film’s critics, I hated TLL. To say it’s a flawed project is something of an understatement – there’s enough that’s wrong with it to make it easy to despise, and certainly, any movie that has the talents of Ben Kingsley, Colin Firth and Aishwarya Rai to hand should have done better. Then again, I would suggest that viewers expecting a film of any great significance are bound to be disappointed. TLL is a romp, an action adventure in the classical tradition. Its heroes are, well, heroic. The villains are bad to the bone, and that’s the limits of its depth in terms of characterisation. The action scenes are genuinely thrilling and choreographed beautifully, especially when Rai is on screen. The set piece when our heroes infiltrate Capri is perhaps the pick of the bunch, but this lot can scrap effectively given any location and opponent.

At heart, TLL should be enjoyed as little more than mindless entertainment, something through which to chew popcorn like cud and switch one’s brain off for a couple of hours. It’s far from great stuff - historians (like me) could very well be insulted by the fallacies inherent in the script, though this is hardly the first instance of a swords and sandals affair shelving facts in favour of nudging the story along. Fans of Firth aren’t going to be overjoyed by their hero’s underwhelming performance either. For all that, it’s good fun. The running time ticks by amiably enough, and viewers expecting a good, daft time won’t be too disappointed with this deeply flawed and very silly hokum.