News and Culture

The 3-D preview screening of the all-singing, all-fighting, all-screwing production of Beowulf was held Tuesday night after the WW print deadline. That’s why we have the Web. WARNING: This review contains at least one major spoiler; it’s hard to talk about why the movie is so bad without revealing its twist. Anyhow:

Thirteen centuries of poetic tradition, and here is the reward: Anthony Hopkins’ digitally enhanced naked ass. This is one of the first sights in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, which translates the Old English epic into motion-capture computer animation—and 3-D animation at that, which means the characters that look like rubber action figures up close look like paper dolls from a distance. Still, the movie is a milestone of sorts: It marks the first time a 3-D cartoon has been marketed to adults instead of children.

Okay, so “adult” isn’t exactly the right word, not when a running theme is stripping Ray Winstone naked and strategically placing his sexy beast behind long, pointy objects—a candle, a broadsword, a claw and, yes, a helmet—that jut out at the audience. Indeed, a desire for penetration is the prevailing mood, whether the movie is making an (admirable) effort to reintroduce “swiving” to the common vernacular, or finishing an action scene with a money shot of its hero bursting through a sea monster’s eye while screaming his own name. (”Beeoowuuuulf!” Really.) Even when its thoughts turn to higher matters, the movie has sex on the brain: Hopkins’ King Unferth rejects a suggestion that his people pray to the new “Christ god,” and almost immediately reveals that he knows of another divine-human hybrid—and this time, it’s personal!

This development is a bit of a deviation from the source material, and appears to be a result of the screenwriters—Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary—listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin at age 12, then moving on to watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings movies while reading Maxim. This seems increasingly likely as time is devoted to the monster Grendel, a music-hatin’ troll that is voiced by Crispin Glover and looks like a cross between Gollum and the mutated bear in John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy. And it’s the only conclusion to reach after meeting Grendel’s Mother. That would be Angelina Jolie, nude, with her naughty bits covered in gold body paint. (This, combined with the hide-the-penis jokes and the Brit slang—“Bollocks!”—creates what I have to assume is an accidental homage to the Austin Powers movies.) Forget all that ancient guff about honor and glory; Grendel’s mom was a MILF?

The movie is laughably, achingly bad, with almost no redeeming qualities (though John Malkovich and Brenden Gleeson give their bit parts an honest effort). It gets even sillier as it moves into its second hour, which is dominated by Winstone looking plastic and guilt-ridden, and Robin Wright Penn looking plastic and superior. You swive just one demon nymph, and your wife never lets you forget it.

There’s no use in taking a similarly prissy tone about Zemeckis so obviously not having read Tolkien’s Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics—after all, the poem is a classic only so far as it has bored generations of college students forced to read it. Still, there’s something depressing about a Beowulf that can only think about getting some snatch—just as it’s dispiriting to watch a movie so primed to become a video game, because it already looks just like one. PG-13. AARON MESH.

Beowulf opens Friday at Lloyd Center, Evergreen, Hilltop, Wilsonville, Cornelius, Division, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Cinema 99, City Center, Eastport, Sherwood, Sandy, Pioneer Place, Cedar Hills and Cinetopia. It shows in 3-D—not necessarily an improvement—at Lloyd Center.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 8:59 am and is filed under Culture, Screen, Spotted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.