2026 Movie Gauntlet - 25. Watch a movie where the most popular rating is ½ star
I was digging around in Jason Statham’s filmography recently when I came across this title and its abysmal 1.7 star rating here on Letterboxd. As I flipped over to the reviews, I saw that
the top one was only half a star, and bemoaned the absurdly large $60 million dollar budget used to bring this abomination to life (for reference, the first
Pirates of the Caribbean film had the same studio price tag). Having never before seen an Uwe Boll production, and curious to watch Statham in a slightly different kind of action role, I hit play last night, and holy shit what a terrible mistake that turned out to be!
This is essentially the poor man’s
Lord of the Rings, and that’s putting it kindly. It has the occasional glimmer of a well-choreographed fight sequence or artfully applied prosthetic, but such an overwhelming majority of the screenplay comes across as cheesy and clunky enough that the whole thing winds up feeling more at home among the ilk of 2000s era of spoof flicks like
Epic Movie and
Superhero Movie. Apparently the whole thing is based on a video game, which
might explain some of the meandering plot here, had I any familiarity with the property before watching, but alas, I did not, and was doomed to linger in a constant state of bafflement over the increasingly nonsensical story beats.
I think the weirdest thing about all of this was how ridiculously stacked the cast is. Aside from Statham, you’ve got Ron Perlman, Ray Liotta, John Rhys-Davies, Matthew Lillard, Burt Reynolds and Leelee Sobieski on deck — an amalgam of talent that, on a better production, would have guaranteed a blockbuster success, but is totally wasted here. Statham’s dedication to his Cockney accent and the exact same buzz cut in every movie makes him feel like he’s still Frank Martin from the
Transporter films, just briefly cosplaying as a medieval farmer for no apparent reason. The only halfway entertaining interactions here are all the scenes shared between Liotta and Lillard, who are desperately chewing on the embarrassing dialogue they’ve been given in an attempt to breathe some campy life into their roles.
The worst part, though, was simply how long this torture dragged out for. The runtime here is inexplicably two and a half hours, and the so-called “adventure” plods along at an agonizing pace that just goes on and on and ON until you as a viewer are slowly driven insane. There were like three different places where this could have easily ended before it actually did. I couldn’t even tell you anything else about my viewing experience at this point, I’m just happy to have made it out alive with my synapses still firing. Somehow, Boll and Co. made not one, but TWO additional, apparently shittier sequels to this mess??? Will wonders never cease?!
