Covering the Ninth Legion once again, but picking up several years after the failed mission into Northern Britain, Marcus Aquila is a young and strong-willed Roman soldier whose father was the commander of the doomed Ninth Legion. After Marcus is injured in battle and discharged from the army, he decides to mount a mission to retrieve the bronze eagle standard that his father carried, the symbol of his family's pride and honour. With a slave called Esca at his side, he travels beyond Hadrian's Wall, or, as the Romans see it, the end of the world.
Channing Tatum currently has an immunity with me, for making the execrable depths of The Dilemma bearable with some unexpected laughs. That immunity was sorely tested by The Eagle, in which he is woefully miscast. He has always had the right build to play military men, so that's fine, but casting him as a Roman soldier is tantamount to casting Chris Tucker as Martin Luther King. He's the most American Roman you have ever heard, and it's all the worse because you can tell he's trying to conceal his accent.
It's all the more disappointing to me because the director on this one is Kevin McDonald, who made The Last King of Scotland and the surprisingly good remake of State of Play. On his first run at what feels like a studio action movie, he doesn't show much of an aptitude for good action scenes, barring the first battle sequence of the film. Eventually, it comes down to the most boring "high-stakes" climactic battle in recent memory. Yes, weaker than even Battle Los Angeles, and it's all thanks to the poor camera-work in the vast majority of the fight scenes.
Let's go back to Centurion for a minute. I liked the way that Marshall used the group dynamic of a bunch of squaddies to relate the audience to Roman soldiers. The relation here is between Americans and Romans, with less-than-subtle allusions made to Rome's hegemony over their known world being similar to America's modern hegemony. Oh, and in case you didn't know, the mission here is to get the eagle back. Everybody got that?
If you hadn't gotten that part, the film itself will do enough to drum it into your skull. The relationship between Tatum and Bell, Marcus and Esca, master and slave is more than a little homoerotic. There's nothing wrong with that, except that I really don't think it was intentional, seeing as how the two have the chemistry of water and Fanta whenever they're not hacking at stuff with swords. The main topic of discussion in those down times? The eagle, and how they need to get it back. Just in case, like me, you're being driven to sleep.
The Eagle is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen The Eagle, why not share your comments below?
I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.