Beowulf & Grendel

I'd been looking forward to this movie since I saw the trailer online this past winter. It finally made its way to our neck of the woods (it's played in every other country in the world except ours until now) and I have to be honest... it was NOT worth the wait. This is a prime example of what I'd call a pretentiously boring waste of time. It tries to have more depth than your typical fantastical adventure movie, but it fails miserably due to shoddy direction, laughably bad acting and some truly awful creative choices. While I can understand that the Grendel character mumbles a lot (he has no language since he raised himself), but what at first seems like an inspired decision by the filmmakers turns out to be so damned silly since he eventually sounds like he's making baby talk and fart noises. And to make it even more goofy there is a character that actually understands what he's saying! WTF?! And did I really need to see Grendel get the premature evacuation? C'mon! It's slow to the point of tears, it's not interesting in any way and basically they took the plot of the epic poem and pissed upon it. Sometimes having a low budget can actually be a bad thing when you're trying to make an epic action adventure film. The cheesy Christopher Lambert version that came out a few years back kicks the shit out of this worthless turd.

0 out of 5


*written 8/13/06