I watched The 13th Warrior the other day. A 1999 movie of the type that I used to pick-up as my buy two get one free back in my weekly Blockbusters days. I knew nothing about it but it's directed by the guy who directed Die Hard, comes from a Michael Crichton novel and stars Antonio Banderas with… omg… Omar Sharif, how bad can it be?
Well, it's that weird kind of low budget fantasy setting with pretensions to a serious big-budget audience. And it's virtually all unbearable crap. But not good crap like Conan or Flash Gordon, and not funny crap to compensate, but rather this almost unending link of cliches that leaves one more WTF'ed and yawning that anything else. There's tuns of light gore, but not a single flash of boobs or bums, for example, as if it was too good for that kind of thing, but not good enough for a decent script.
Its about 1000AD and an Arab diplomat, played by Bandares, gets banished to Europa for flirting with the Emperor of Baghdad's woman (first eyeroll) where he and his translator… omg… Omar Sharif, get lumbered with a Viking feast. Cue 20 yawning minutes of Viking cliches as Sharif translates things such as burping and hearty laughing. Eventually it's revealed by a mad old crone that 13 Warriors need to go north to defeat a great evil. And Banderas is to be the 13th.
So we get a movie supposedly all about the Banderas character when, in actuality, it's just the Magnificent Seven and Banderas just plays one of the tag-alongs to the primary cast of two 'real men' Vikings, played by some guys you might have heard of, but probably haven't. To which we get another 30 minutes of tired cliches as the Vikings learn to respect Banderas and perform such entertainment as belching and hearty laughing.
Finally the action kicks in around the two-thirds mark, but it turns out the great evil is just a horde of humans pretending to be generic Orcs. And this is no great spoiler… . Everything that takes place after this is ludicrously unbelievable horseshit as 1,000 Orc cavalry fail to take a small Viking village for no other reason than ex machina and our heroes have a 'big adventure' to kill a small, not even magical, woman in a cave.
Fantasy without magic, quite gorey but only good for saturday afternoon television, hearty laughing instead of dialogue. etc etc
No wonder Fantasy used to get such a bad cinema reputation. 6.6 on Metacritic… bwhahahaha, yeah… right…