Centurion stars a shirtless Michael Fassbender, The Wire’s Dominic West and Olga Kurylenko, a former Bond girl and model who deserves a better acting career than she is currently getting. It is an action drama film that imagines what happened to the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army when they went into Britain, which is apparently one of the great, unsolved historical mysteries, but not what attracted me to the movie. It also features the Governor from The Walking Dead, who feels like a second rate Rome’s Ray Stevenson in this film, and Ser Davos from Game of Thrones, who plays a character named Brick, which made me wonder if the kid from the Middle got older and built a time machine.
Centurion could have been a solid action film, but the film speed feels higher than normal. The director glories in showing what happens to the human body when a blow hits its mark, but it is not satisfying if we don’t get to enjoy the fight sequences like a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance sequence. There seems to be a correlation with peeing and being in danger that is usually associated with horror films and sex. For the most part, the film is rather predictable and begins with my least favorite trope, how we got here by showing a later scene at the beginning.
Centurion is at best, a strange exercise in divided sympathies or at worst, self-hate as a British production that casts the Roman invaders as heroes, but also relates to the local resisting Picts. Though the film does an effective job at trying to get audiences to empathize with the Romans by making them a rag tag group of multicultural underdogs, it never quite succeeds because they are Romans so just no.
Even though I hate the “you can’t trust women” trope, Etain was so bad ass and surprised me with a couple of maneuvers that she was probably one of the main reasons that I enjoyed Centurion. None of the women, except the nice ones, get any substantial lines, but they get the best battles although I’m not sure how practical it is to engage in close combat with a long spear, but hey, you do you. I still hate the “we have overwhelming numbers so let’s attack you one by one so you have a chance to dispatch us and win” trope.
Centurion would probably be more effective as a pilot for a series than a movie with three shifting story lines: the treacherous Romans trying to survive and conquer, the revolting Picts and the Roman soldiers caught in the middle who cannot trust either side. As a movie, it lacks a credibility and confidence in its story line and relies too much on tropes, but as a series, there would be more time to flesh out the anti-hero, shifting sympathies element of the story. As it is, Centurion is an entertaining, but ultimately mediocre exploration of a legend that could have been better. Check it out if you like the cast or if you are really into the legend, but for those who are gore averse, skip it.