Film Review: Centurion

No-one actually snarls ‘Did you spill my pint?’ in Centurion – I don’t think they had pints in 2nd-century Britain – but this is what you might call ‘Did You Spill My Pint?’ Cinema: laddish, belligerent and fond of a fight, the bloodier the better. In real life, such behaviour is often reprehensible. For an action movie, it’s just about right – fearsomely effective, if not very elegant.

Elegance has never been the forte of Newcastle-born director Neil Marshall, who previously gave us underground zombies in The Descent and Mad Max-like car chases in Doomsday. Instead, his defining trait (apart from a full-blooded taste for gross excess and bone-crunching violence) has always been independence: like Luc Besson in France, albeit on a smaller scale, he makes regional, middle-budget action flicks aiming to compete with Hollywood in the global marketplace. Maybe that’s why his characters also tend to a kind of rugged existentialism. “I owe allegiance to no man but whom I choose,” says someone in Centurion, and our hero Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) – a Roman soldier fighting the Picts in the Wild North of Britain – puts it even more simply. “The gods have forsaken us,” he says. We make our own destiny.

If you wanted to get political, you could say Marshall’s worldview – both as a filmmaker and within the films he makes – is essentially libertarian, touting individual choice and the freedom of the entrepreneur. It’s worth getting a little bit political, because Centurion is set in a political conflict – the mighty, but corrupt, Roman Empire vs. the stubborn Picts whose guerrilla tactics (they strike hard and fast, then withdraw) are what we might call ‘terrorist’ – and it’s interesting that the film comes out for neither side, focusing instead on the individuals caught in the middle. It’s built like a monster movie with the woad-painted Picts as the savage Other, the chief monster being Etain (Olga Kurylenko), a feral tracker with a grudge against the Romans and superhuman hunting powers. She’s one with the land, able to read the ground and smell the wind, recalling a Roman officer’s rueful observation that “Even the land wants us dead here”.

‘Here’ is Scotland (also the setting for Doomsday, so maybe Mr. Marshall’s worked out a special relationship with the Scottish Film Board), treated like New Zealand in Lord of the Rings, a land of mist and mountains. An ambush in a misty forest is among the highlights, albeit turning into a long montage of carnage – split skulls, gouged eyes – that goes beyond anything Frodo and Co. had to face, the battlefield covered in “a slurry of blood, puke, piss, and the entrails of friends and enemies”. Centurion is pretty uninhibited when it comes to violence, though in fact there are hints of enforced cuts in various places: the murder of a child isn’t shown, understandably, nor (less understandably) is a sex scene that seems all but inevitable when Quintus and his men take shelter with a sultry necromancer. Given that the film was rated ‘15’ (not ‘18’) in Britain, you have to wonder if the sight of exposed flesh was too much for the UK Ratings Board, even though flesh being hacked and mauled was apparently okay.

There aren’t many clever twists in Centurion. A smarter film might’ve had our heroes kidnap the child and hold him hostage (he’s the son of the Pict chief) but here they just kill him, spurring a quest for revenge. Even when Quintus makes a plan, it counts for nothing (Etain finds them anyway). Brain is no match for brawn; Marshall’s world is macho, a soldier’s world of bar-brawls (“Get stuck in!”) and grace under torture. This is actually a B-movie, its genre being not so much the Braveheart-style historical as the Dirty Dozen template of an elite squad faced with a mission impossible. There’s the Indian, the token black (who literally ends up thrown to the wolves), the old soldier on his last tour – he had his eye on a little farm in Tuscany before this thing happened – and of course the laconic, inscrutable leader with hints of a dark past. Even this, however, isn’t really explored; as in Doomsday, Marshall likes to toy with genres, try them on for size, then move on. He lacks Tarantino’s ability to immerse himself, which is why he’ll probably never move beyond the well-made B-movie.

Still, there’s a lot to be said for the well-made B-movie – and Centurion, for all its flaws, has a certain uncompromising earnestness that’s almost endearing. It’s crude and messy but it’s made with passion, not by committee – a passion both for guilty movie pleasures and the Scottish landscape, the old warrior ethos, the Celtic wildness at the core of the British subconscious. I’ll continue watching Marshall’s bellicose action flicks, though I wouldn’t necessarily like to go drinking with him. Oi! You! Did you spill my pint?