pawebster

I was pretty gripped by this all the way through, due to the intriguing story and above all by Arthur Hughes' excellent performance. Everyone else acts well too. There are a lot of anachronisms, as others have noted, but few people comment on the fact that it was filmed in eastern Europe and it shows. The architecture is wrong, wrong, wrong and so is the countryside and coastline. It's supposed to be the English channel. I doubt that what we see is the sea at all, since eastern Europe is short on coastline. It's probably a lake. There is some dodgy CGI and some of the village exteriors/London streets (which are all alleyways for some reason, doubtless to do with cheapness) look as if they are made of cardboard.

This is a very entertaining film - silly and funny (the two don't always go together - see below). I can't say that I laughed out loud very often, but it was amusing. Orlando Bloom and Bryce Dallas Howard are both very good, especially Bloom. Mohammed and Ashenden could have done a bit more with their roles. I know they are meant to be the dull, conventional ones, but they take that too far in my opinion. Alexander Owen falls into the "silly, but not funny" category. He was one of the writers, so I suspect he may have had the chance a funnier part for himself, but thought that silliness was good enough.