We’ve sort of never understood the geek appeal of Neil Marshall. “Dog Soldiers” was ok, but “The Descent” was terribly overrated while “Doomsday” was just plain awful. Regardless, fanboys continue to champion this guy and it probably won’t end with “Centurion.”
The trailer for the film has hit the web and unfortunately it’s pretty generic stuff. While we’ll hold out hope it will still be worthy of our Potentially Decent Escapist Entertainment Films Of 2010, we’re not brimming with optimism here.
Ever since “300,” it seems any period based action film has to have lots of yelling and guys speaking each line as if it were the most important piece of dialogue in the film and the trailer for Marshall’s film is no different. We kind of laughed at the early shot of Olga Kurylenko who has some remarkably great hair and makeup for Roman times. James McNulty Dominic West looks woefully miscast here, while we’re just going to pretend that the excellent Michael Fassbender isn’t in this. And the action scenes? They look well staged but not unlike anything we’ve seen before.
“Centurion” opens in the UK on April 23rd and is thankfully not in 3D. Currently, it doesn’t have a stateside distributor or release date. We imagine that will all depend on how well (or not) this film is received.
