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| Directed by John McTiernan; Starring Antonio Bandaras, Diane Venora, Vladimir Kulich, Maria Hausserman, Sven Wolliter, and Omar Sherif |
The week before walking into the theatre for The 13th Warrior I watched a film on network television that I had not seen in quite a while. The film was Die Hard With a Vengeance and it allowed me to remember when director John McTiernan was doing better work. His recent The Thomas Crown Affair was quite the disappointment, but for a while there he was on top of his league. Sure he made Last Action Hero at this time, but one must recall that his eyes were behind modern day action successes Die Hard and The Hunt for the Red October. As I watched Die Hard With a Vengeance, I recalled just how good it is and how much of a step down The Thomas Crown Affair is. I had dearly hoped that maybe The 13th Warrior would be McTiernan doing his last good work before Thomas Crown (13th Warrior has been on the shelf at Touchstone Pictures for a long time and McTiernan directed Thomas Crown during that shelved period). Unfortunately it is not.
The 13th Warrior is somewhat of an amalgamation of many action adventure films set in medieval times. The film looks and feels much like Willow and, most of all, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Telling the story of an Arabian (Bandaras) that finds himself caught up in a mission with twelve Danish warriors, The 13th Warrior does not try to exceed the genre that it is in. There are moments of poorly attempted comedy, but all in all the film remains an action film, giving adrenaline pumped direction even in the most serene moments. The problem is that there is nothing in it that is that exasperating, most of it just eye-candy, and poor eye-candy at that.
McTiernan is easily the only good thing about the film. Though I did not find his direction to be great, I did think that it was above what most directors would do with this material. I must admit that his direction is so well paced that I would have never guessed that I was in the theatre for nearly two hours, instead it was like I had watched a bad episode of Amazing Stories without the commercials. The screenplay, based on the novel Eaters of the Dead by over used novelist Michael Crichton, is poor and has absolutely no idea of what it is doing half the time (the scene in which Bandaras learns to speak Danish is so bad that I’d think Akiva Goldsman was in as a pseudonym). The 13th Warrior is not a watchable film, nor is it in any way understandable half the time.
