but unfortunately this was one of the rare ones. I love epic fantasy, but this movie relates to LOTR and Gladiator as a bottle rocket relates to the Starship Enterprise, and to mention them in the same breath is a monumental insult to those fine films. I really wanted to like it, honestly. I love Jason Statham and Ron Perlman, and the rest of the cast (yes, even Burt Reynolds, who didn't deserve the audience's derisive laughter every time he appeared) were fine, although Ray Liotta was comically miscast and mis-costumed as Liberace. The British Columbia scenery was nice. The storyline, scriptwriting and editing, however, were absolutely abysmal. Just awful. The attempts at mid-battle banter were incredibly inept - they actually stop fighting to say things like "What took you so long?" and "They don't scare easily!". Jason Statham fights off big monsters who are armed with broadswords with what looks like a flimsy machete, while Ron Perlman uses a pickaxe(!). The opening scenes are amazingly clumsy, they just dump you randomly into the story with no preamble. And I am so tired of the overused Chinese martial arts film cliché of showing the audience a plain shot of mysterious badguys who suddenly aren't there as soon as the movie characters look - it's so cheaply manipulative. Lame, predictable line follows lame predictable line. When John Rhys-Davies comes to the bedside of the (unbeknownst to him) just-poisoned king (Burt Reynolds) I said to myself "If he says "The king has been poisoned!" I'm outta here... and guess what he said?
