LABYRINTH is a two-part miniseries in which a modern woman finds her destiny linked with that of a 13th century ancestor and the Holy Grail. It's spectacularly bad, a sort of chick-lit Dan Brown which raids history for bad conspiracy theories and thinks drama consists of soap opera plots between pouting women and brooding bad boys. It's almost hilariously inaccurate, depicting Cathars as modern liberals (they weren't), female healers being hunted as witches (the Church at the time actually said witches didn't exist), Crusaders motivated entirely by greed and every other cliché you can imagine, right down to the heroine's evil sister turning out to be...her half sister! The final message is laugh out loud juvenile (essentially: be nice) and after hours of twisting Catholic theology and attacking the Church on spurious grounds, it ends with the revelation that magic is real! The dialogue is awful, the acting variable at best, the nudity unnecessary, and the battle scenes only exist as trailer fodder; to give you some idea, at one point the hero and three men all hide from arrows behind the same thin tree. The nicest I can say is that the production values are good, there's a lovely title shot and John Hurt is always good even when he's slumming.
Review of Labyrinth
