*sigh* Where do I begin? Well, maybe from me being from Bulgaria, and, as this film explicitly told us, it was filmed in Bulgaria.
First of all, I want to say that I am ashamed of the Bulgarian actors and their horrific English accents. It's obvious that nobody actually cared to practice their lines for more than ten minutes before filming. And even I, the Bulgarian (though with a certified proficiency in English), couldn't stop cringing when they'd speak. And when the little girls, present on screen maybe for 2 minutes, speak English better than your main cast, you know you're in trouble. The evil king (whose name I couldn't understand at all, Marian Valev) also contributed to this horror of mine, especially with his dreadfully placed "BETRAYAL?!" line. And Uncle Tybalt (Nikolai Sotirov) had the worst accent of them all, yet he was given the epic speech near the end... I wonder how poor Dominic Purcell didn't feel the need to rip his ears off... At least some of the actors' mistakes were funny to hear, like Ralitsa Paskaleva's: "Go on the horse". "Go." Not "get".
Maybe it wasn't the actors' fault. Perhaps the screenwriter wasn't at all proficient in English?... *sigh* Forget it.
Now, accents aside, this film is still terrible. The opening is boring and drags on forever. Dominic Purcell, ever the watchful assassin, leaves his fingerprints all over a crime scene and nobody even notices the pile of corpses he's left in the hallway of a big hotel. He then goes to some random people's flat -- it's got a little inscription on the door saying something like "The Andrews family" or whatever it was -- and smokes a cigarette in the kitchen. Nothing about that is explained. It's not his flat, because it's a family home, as the tag tells us.
Dominic isn't "the chosen one", and the film relies on his accidental getting of a tattoo to justify him being selected to bring order to the fallen kingdom... of Bulgaria. Then, the portal to the medieval world opens up for no apparent reason, at which point Dominic starts shooting at a dragon with a gun. I must admit, that's pretty hilarious and also a perfectly natural response to seeing a damn *dragon* in front of you.
Did you catch the big reveal? Bulgaria. The film takes place in Bulgaria. The *story* takes place in Bulgaria. It's not Dungeon Siege any more, it's not "Ehb". Ralitsa Paskaleva's character straight-up tells Dominic Purcell that he's in Bulgaria.
Last I checked, there weren't any dragons in Bulgaria, neither in the medieval one, nor in the modern one.
Anyhow, Dominic is now in the dragon-infested medieval Bulgaria, apparently. It is by sheer luck that he's been teleported into the right place for the rightful heirs of the throne to find him and to bring him along on their quest for glory and peace. And so on...
And once again, our main character was not given any armour whatsoever. Like in all the previous "In the Name of the King"s, which continues to make no sense at all.
The villain is as 2D as he could get, he's flat, one-sided and not even interesting or rational. He does have a court though -- or should I say a courtYARD, as the courtyard of the Baba Vida castle, probably, is about as much as we see of his fortress.
The plot doesn't make too much of a sense, and the battles don't either. People have conversations in the middle of battles, and apparently yelling "STOOOP FIGHTIIING" at the top of your voice actually causes soldiers to stop fighting.
So, the accents are a disgrace, and villain is a disgrace, the plot is a disgrace, and the combat scenes are as well. Dominic Purcell actually throws a sword and it kills someone. Unbelievable.
Did I mention the Shaman? Yes, there's a "shaman" in medieval Bulgaria. He cooks things on a fire using a large soviet-era metal cooking pot. A "shaman" in an Eastern Orthodox country. Yes...
You know what else is a disgrace, to top everything off? The costumes. The bad guys wear a blend of XIV c. plate armours, Saracen turbans and yatagans, and katanas and what looked like Japanese Samurai armour. Truly something to be called an "eyesore", and it's NOT something you'd ever see in medieval Bugaria.
Talking about disgraces, I should mention the ending. It's truly and utterly, and completely and terribly, and I ran out of adverbs, dreadful, with the dragon passing through the portal and chasing Dominic's hijacked soviet-era Zhiguli through the streets of Sovia. Oh, dear... (Dominic also steals the driver's shirt later, which was actually funny.)
This is the first film in my life that caused me to take a pen and write down all the faults in it. By the end, I had four full pages written in my notebook. "Oh God, why?", says the popular Internet meme. I'd ask the same.
If only they didn't say that this was taking place in medieval BULGARIA, I'd be more lenient. As it stands, it's like having a very bad film set during Charlemagne's reign in France, but having people running around fighting Norse-style elves in Zulu armour or whatever, with Buddhism being the predominant religion. It's just nonsensical. And disgraceful.
Reading the (only) plot summary at the time of posting of this review, it seems that Uwe Boll himself has written it. "Inspired by Dungeon Siege"? The film takes place in medieval Bulgaria. Ish. "Mind-blowing special effects"? Not a chance in hell. You know what the CGI dragon lacks? MASS. It looked and felt like a CGI thing superimposed on the picture. Not like a dragon, unlike other films. Hell, "Dungeons and Dragons 2: Wrath of the Dragon God" is a quadrillion times better than this, and it's not the best fantasy film with dragons either. "Nonstop action"? Yeah, right. "A massive army"? Probably, if you call thirty men "a massive army". (Still better than the previous film, where armies were six men on each side.) In fact, I'm gonna go round there and try to submit a different summary that doesn't glorify this piece of rubbi... "art". With heavy air-quotes.
Seriously, don't waste your life with this. Go and watch something else. There's plenty of good films to choose from, and many better bad ones too. Watch the first "In the Name of the King". It's actually good fun, if you can believe it.
Such a disgrace to my motherland. *sigh* Damn you, Uwe Boll...
First of all, I want to say that I am ashamed of the Bulgarian actors and their horrific English accents. It's obvious that nobody actually cared to practice their lines for more than ten minutes before filming. And even I, the Bulgarian (though with a certified proficiency in English), couldn't stop cringing when they'd speak. And when the little girls, present on screen maybe for 2 minutes, speak English better than your main cast, you know you're in trouble. The evil king (whose name I couldn't understand at all, Marian Valev) also contributed to this horror of mine, especially with his dreadfully placed "BETRAYAL?!" line. And Uncle Tybalt (Nikolai Sotirov) had the worst accent of them all, yet he was given the epic speech near the end... I wonder how poor Dominic Purcell didn't feel the need to rip his ears off... At least some of the actors' mistakes were funny to hear, like Ralitsa Paskaleva's: "Go on the horse". "Go." Not "get".
Maybe it wasn't the actors' fault. Perhaps the screenwriter wasn't at all proficient in English?... *sigh* Forget it.
Now, accents aside, this film is still terrible. The opening is boring and drags on forever. Dominic Purcell, ever the watchful assassin, leaves his fingerprints all over a crime scene and nobody even notices the pile of corpses he's left in the hallway of a big hotel. He then goes to some random people's flat -- it's got a little inscription on the door saying something like "The Andrews family" or whatever it was -- and smokes a cigarette in the kitchen. Nothing about that is explained. It's not his flat, because it's a family home, as the tag tells us.
Dominic isn't "the chosen one", and the film relies on his accidental getting of a tattoo to justify him being selected to bring order to the fallen kingdom... of Bulgaria. Then, the portal to the medieval world opens up for no apparent reason, at which point Dominic starts shooting at a dragon with a gun. I must admit, that's pretty hilarious and also a perfectly natural response to seeing a damn *dragon* in front of you.
Did you catch the big reveal? Bulgaria. The film takes place in Bulgaria. The *story* takes place in Bulgaria. It's not Dungeon Siege any more, it's not "Ehb". Ralitsa Paskaleva's character straight-up tells Dominic Purcell that he's in Bulgaria.
Last I checked, there weren't any dragons in Bulgaria, neither in the medieval one, nor in the modern one.
Anyhow, Dominic is now in the dragon-infested medieval Bulgaria, apparently. It is by sheer luck that he's been teleported into the right place for the rightful heirs of the throne to find him and to bring him along on their quest for glory and peace. And so on...
And once again, our main character was not given any armour whatsoever. Like in all the previous "In the Name of the King"s, which continues to make no sense at all.
The villain is as 2D as he could get, he's flat, one-sided and not even interesting or rational. He does have a court though -- or should I say a courtYARD, as the courtyard of the Baba Vida castle, probably, is about as much as we see of his fortress.
The plot doesn't make too much of a sense, and the battles don't either. People have conversations in the middle of battles, and apparently yelling "STOOOP FIGHTIIING" at the top of your voice actually causes soldiers to stop fighting.
So, the accents are a disgrace, and villain is a disgrace, the plot is a disgrace, and the combat scenes are as well. Dominic Purcell actually throws a sword and it kills someone. Unbelievable.
Did I mention the Shaman? Yes, there's a "shaman" in medieval Bulgaria. He cooks things on a fire using a large soviet-era metal cooking pot. A "shaman" in an Eastern Orthodox country. Yes...
You know what else is a disgrace, to top everything off? The costumes. The bad guys wear a blend of XIV c. plate armours, Saracen turbans and yatagans, and katanas and what looked like Japanese Samurai armour. Truly something to be called an "eyesore", and it's NOT something you'd ever see in medieval Bugaria.
Talking about disgraces, I should mention the ending. It's truly and utterly, and completely and terribly, and I ran out of adverbs, dreadful, with the dragon passing through the portal and chasing Dominic's hijacked soviet-era Zhiguli through the streets of Sovia. Oh, dear... (Dominic also steals the driver's shirt later, which was actually funny.)
This is the first film in my life that caused me to take a pen and write down all the faults in it. By the end, I had four full pages written in my notebook. "Oh God, why?", says the popular Internet meme. I'd ask the same.
If only they didn't say that this was taking place in medieval BULGARIA, I'd be more lenient. As it stands, it's like having a very bad film set during Charlemagne's reign in France, but having people running around fighting Norse-style elves in Zulu armour or whatever, with Buddhism being the predominant religion. It's just nonsensical. And disgraceful.
Reading the (only) plot summary at the time of posting of this review, it seems that Uwe Boll himself has written it. "Inspired by Dungeon Siege"? The film takes place in medieval Bulgaria. Ish. "Mind-blowing special effects"? Not a chance in hell. You know what the CGI dragon lacks? MASS. It looked and felt like a CGI thing superimposed on the picture. Not like a dragon, unlike other films. Hell, "Dungeons and Dragons 2: Wrath of the Dragon God" is a quadrillion times better than this, and it's not the best fantasy film with dragons either. "Nonstop action"? Yeah, right. "A massive army"? Probably, if you call thirty men "a massive army". (Still better than the previous film, where armies were six men on each side.) In fact, I'm gonna go round there and try to submit a different summary that doesn't glorify this piece of rubbi... "art". With heavy air-quotes.
Seriously, don't waste your life with this. Go and watch something else. There's plenty of good films to choose from, and many better bad ones too. Watch the first "In the Name of the King". It's actually good fun, if you can believe it.
Such a disgrace to my motherland. *sigh* Damn you, Uwe Boll...