• Directed by Graham Baker
• Written by Mark Leahy and David Chappe
• Starring
  • Christopher Lambert
  • Rhona Mitra
  • Oliver Cotton
  • Götz Otto
  • Layla Roberts
• Produced by Gregory Cascante, Lawrence Kasanoff and Donald Kushner
• Executive Produced by Jane Barclay, Sharon Harel, Peter Locke, and Alison Savitch

So why hasn’t Beowulf inspired as many big-screen (or, for that matter, small-screen) versions as other mythic heroes? Partly, I suppose, because Beowulf didn’t have a whole variety of episodic exploits like Hercules or Robin Hood or King Arthur; and partly because, rather than having a number of different versions of the legend, we have the story from a single account written in Old English. That’s why Beowulf doesn’t have the pop-culture cachet of the above-mentioned heroes (even though he did have his own short-lived DC Comics series in the seventies, as a poor answer to Marvel’s successful Conan franchise; for proof, click here).

Nevertheless, our brawny Dane still has had his share of reinterpeters. And why not? The tale as we have it borders on hagiography, with the perfectly heroic Beowulf taking on the bad-for-the-sake-of-badness Grendel and then, as if that weren’t enough, Grendel’s mother. It’s all told in such glowing terms, complete with a gloss of Christianity over an obviously Pagan tale, that it can’t help but start the imagination working: What was really going on there behind the whitewash passed down by the storytellers?

My favorite version of the legend is John Gardner’s wonderful novel, Grendel, told from the slightly unreliable viewpoint of the monster; my second favorite was inspired by the novel — an eighteen-minute b-side also named “Grendel” by British prog-rock band Marillion. Both are wonderful attacks on the simplistic “hero good/monster bad” that informs the received text, and both make blatant what the original story only reveals in passing: That Grendel’s a lot more interesting than Beowulf. (I should qualify that by saying that the end of the Beowulf poem, which recounts his final bout with a dragon, is a wonderfully bittersweet account of a golden age in decline, like the best versions of the Arthurian cycle; however, this episode is almost an afterthought tacked onto the main story of young Beowulf vs. Grendel.)

In one of those freak Hollywood coincidences, 1999 saw the production of two different version of the Beowulf myth. The one that was released in theaters was The 13th Warrior, which received a well-deserved lukewarm reception; it was a competent movie, but not terribly compelling. What interested me most about it was the way in which Michael Crichton (basing the screenplay on his novel Eaters of the Dead) extrapolated backward from the myth to construct a plausible and naturalistic basis for the fantastic story. (When I saw how he was going to introduce “Grendel’s mother,” I broke into a wide grin and congratulated the man from my living room.) I was also appalled to find that none of the published reviews at the time even commented on the original Beowulf myth and its treatment here, beyond a short “Oh yeah, if you ever read Beowulf in school you may notice some similarities” statement. As far as I was concerned, that was the most interesting feature of the movie. (Yeah, they’re all quick to point out how a science fiction movie is a dressed-up western, and how that western is actually a reset samurai film, sure, but just let the original be written in alliterative verse and see how quickly they desert the discussion of roots…)

The other production, of course, was the movie here being reviewed, simply titled Beowulf, which got European release last year and recently premiered on video in the U.S. (I know, I know — it’s about damned time I got to the review. Where do I think I am, Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension?) It is, well, an interesting attempt at reinterpreting and resetting the myth. That is, the attempt is interesting. The finished product is not especially interesting; Beowulf himself is not particularly interesting; and, more’s the pity, Grendel is not too interesting either.

The setting is largely unexplained: It’s a pseudo-European medieval milieu, set off by unexplained technology. For example, Hrothgar’s outpost is a castle (shot in Bulgaria), with a couple of jets of flame like a foundry and a weird doohickey on top of the biggest turret that opens and closes like a mechanical flower, releasing a belch of flame into the air. The interiors are the same castle, with walls redressed with piping and other fixtures to give just a hint of Industrial. Along with the modified-medieval costuming, and you’ve got something that lands ends up like a grungier Krull with a mechanical bent.

Into this place rides Beowulf (Christopher Lambert) on his way to the outpost, wearing novel leather-and-buckle clothes and with his hair still chopped short and bleached blond from Mean Guns. A young girl has fled in terror from the outpost, where a mysterious monster is killing the denizens nightly, and into the arms of the hordes who have laid siege to the outpost. (Who they are, and what they hope to accomplish with the siege, is never even hinted at.) They prepare to behead her on a platform with the biggest damned straight razor you ever saw, when Beowulf rides up and plays obligatory hero to the damsel in distress.

What we’re treated to here is the best action scene of the movie, as Lambert and his various stunt doubles first fight the hordes from horseback, using a variety of nifty weapons strapped to his person (including automatically-reloading crossbows — make sure to mention them to Santa); he/they then proceed to fight hand-to-hand using yet more nifty swords/knives/morningstars while executing Hong Kong-style backflips all over the place, until the besiegers finally say, “Take her; she’s not worth the trouble.”

Sure, that seems great — except when Beowulf tries to take her back to the outpost, she’s so against the idea that she leaps from the back of his horse and into the waiting arms of the besiegers, who don’t fool around with the big production this time, and simply cut her down.

Welcome to the dark and dreary world.

Welcome, also, to a feature of this movie that I had up to this point been desperately hoping would go away, but which I finally realized was here to stay: The annoying generic-techno soundtrack. It’s been a long time (maybe forever) since I’ve heard a score so completely inappropriate for the movie it accompanied; certainly a garden-variety Jerry Goldsmith style score would have worked better, or even something like the Alan Parsons-flavored score for Ladyhawke; but what we’re left with is supposedly “edgy” stuff that sounds like a videogame soundtrack written by a first-time scorer (Ben Watkins) who really really wished they had let him do the music for Blade.

Now that I’ve gone to great lengths to set the stage for you, let me throw in some big meaty chunks:

Beowulf is accepted suspiciously into the outpost, doubly so because he proclaims he came specifically to fight the monster. We meet the main cast:

- Hrothgar (Oliver Cotton), the commander, weary of seeing his men slaughtered nightly by this strange creature. Each time he and his men try to ward it off, the monster avoids fighting Hrothgar himself, growling, “Not you,” before making mincemeat of others of his warriors. He also has nightly dreams about a very 20th-century-looking supermodelly blonde seducing him, which is somehow tied into dreams/flashbacks of his wife’s accidental death by falling many years ago.

- his right-hand warrior Roland (Götz Otto), who instantly takes a dislike to Beowulf. He wears a perpetual scowl/pout that’s supposed to look mean, but with his close-cropped hair and thin face, he just comes off looking like a pissy Quentin Tarantino.

- Hrothgar’s daughter Kyra (Rhona Mitra), very cute and pouty, who always wears a leather bodice from which her bosoms constantly threaten to spring (a threat, I should inform you, on which they never follow through). She’s got issues relating to her late husband’s death, ostensibly at the hand of Roland during weapons practice; and just as predictably as Roland dislikes Beowulf, she develops the standard love/hate thing for him.

Oh, yes — I haven’t introduced the monster yet. His name isn’t revealed to be “Grendel” until the very end, but we’ll go ahead and call him that from the start. It’s a fairly standard man-in-suit, with which I have no big problem, aside from the lack of imagination it shows; the original poem leaves Grendel’s appearance very much up in the air, and I’d like to think that an FX director could come up with something a little more compelling, given carte blanche. But what makes this critter annoying is that, apparently, the producers in post-production realized that it was a blah costume, and decided to gussy it up. What they chose to do, unfortunately, was to distort him with a really cheap CGI ripple effect, and fog him with a really cheap CGI purple haze. It’s incredibly disappointing; it looks more like something you’d see cranked out in post for a $100,000 Full Moon video than on something with a low-but-respectable $20,000,000 budget like this one.

Now that you’ve got about all of the information, I bet that from here you could predict the lion’s share of the storyline. Roland clashes with Beowulf; Kyra clashes with Beowulf but is strangely drawn to him; Grendel keeps attacking and growing stronger, while Beowulf seems to be the only one who can fend him off, if not decisively defeat him.

It seems that at least one of the screenwriters went to the Trendy ’90s School of Characterization, in which each character is defined largely by his/her “hidden secret.” Hrothgar has the events which show up in his dreams, which somehow tie him intimately to Grendel (I’m not going to spell it out here, but it doesn’t take too many gray cells to figure it out long before it’s officially revealed); Kyra has the death of her abusive husband, which didn’t exactly happen as the Official Story says it did; Roland has his hidden love for Kyra, which drives a lot of his pissy mood; and Beowulf has his not-quite-human heritage which forces him (as he explains) to seek out and fight evil, lest he become evil himself.

Unfortunately, the movie spends too many of its best dimes in the first half hour, leaving most of the rest of the movie to die of attrition. None of the later combat scenes even approach the derivative energy of that initial rescue; there’s an annoyingly “hip” and contemporary-sounding black kid among the white and European-accented cast; and that damned techno score simply won’t dry up and go away, and neither will Grendel’s purple haze.

The denouement obviously involves the fight between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother, and the design behind her appearance is interesting; imagine a spider with leg segments made of antlers, and the head of the Hive Queen from Star Trek: First Contact, and you’ll have the rough outlines. However, the trendy CGI work doesn’t bring it to life, and costs the design its effectiveness.

The most overarching failure lies with the fact that this tantalizing milieu is never broadened. It reminds me in some ways of European comic books, in which science-fiction or science-fantasy settings are often used without the sense of any obligation to explain those milieus beyond what is absolutely necessary. However, the best of these comic books do explain when it is necessary, and Beowulf fails on this count. We never do get to find out who those warriors are who are laying siege to the outpost, or why they decide to pack up and leave when they see Grendel’s detached arm hanging from a flagpole inside the outpost. We never even find out anything about the outposts themselves, and if they are supposed to be the beginnings of colonies in a frontier land or what.

That’s not to say that there are no effective scenes to be had; one in particular stands out, in which the women and children are herded into a barricaded room which can only be opened from the inside, to protect them from Grendel; and as soon as the doors are barred, the startled warriors outside are subjected to screams and roars from the locked interior, as Grendel appears and decimates the helpless. But this one chilling scene certainly can’t carry the full ninety minute running time.

My first sinking feeling came when I saw that there were no less than four credited Executive Producers, a position which is usually one of final decision and overarching vision; the fragmented credit probably explains how some good and promising ideas got mixed so thoroughly with some stinkers to produce this uncompelling alloy.

Bottom line? Perhaps it’s truly impossible to come up with a definitive film version of this epic. But I wouldn’t want to make a judgement on that simply due to this attempt’s mediocrity.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 63 (roughly)
• breasts: 1
• explosions: 3
• dream sequences: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0