Richard the Lionheart: Rebellion

Rarely are low budget films great...but sometimes they can be good. This offering is neither.

A script that was surely written by an able 10 year old, acting that will embarrass the actors for years to come and locations chosen by a blind illiterate moron with no sense of History or Geography. Where are the bloody mountains in Northern France? What were they thinking...Or were they?

(Just watched Vikings Season 4. They sail up the Seine and haul their longboats up cliffs and then pull them over 'the mountains' - WHAT cliffs, WHAT mountains!)

I managed just under 30 mins. There is a simple obvious rule. If you have a low budget, stick to themes that you can afford. Mass battle scenes are clearly out. Spend the money on the script...Or did the actors just make it up as they went along?

They did manage to save some money by not having a Director, well it appears that way.

All in all - a shame. A great idea for a movie...It just needed a budget, a director, a script, actors and basic intelligence choosing locations.

One of the worst films I've had the misfortune to watch. Two minutes in found me fiddling around in my handbag for entertainment.

There were a few minutes when the princes were introduced where I thought it might be worth watching just for the eye candy but they turned out to be corny and just as naff as everything else.

If a knight urgently knocks on a 6 inch thick internal castle door you don't expect it to sound as if its being done on a Formica topped school desk by a 5-year-old .... and when one of the princes need to escape instead of showing him doing it he is told 'there's a tunnel my father told me about' and then they are out! No budget for a tunnel - I like a good tunnel in a medieval drama.

Costumes were dreadful and although the Queens gratuitous nakedness was quite entertaining full frontal breast enhancements in 1173 is just wrong!

Firstly I'm a filmmaker, and I have nothing but respect for those that have actually navigated the gauntlet and succeeded in creating and finishing a film, so; good for the filmmakers.

Unfortunately that's where the praise stops. As they should be experienced enough by now to spot a terrible script. (Cheapest bit to get right, but so rarely done)

The Director ... There aren't words, just: casting: awful, simply awful... What's with the accents all over the place, half the English weren't, the French king sounded like no other 'french' (one heavily and horribly American, others eastern European) in his small theatre OTT. accent. The fights were needlessly unrealistic, tried to be cool, unlucky gamble. Really should have spent more time with casting, as none of the actors came off well and that tells me of a poor director that didn't rehearse with them enough. And didn't breakdown the script properly.

the cinematography: were there two conflicting DOP's?? Some shots were actually classy and well graded and framed and beautiful, making me believe the world. Then they were cut in with horribly framed, shaky hand-held pointless shots which made absolutely no sense. A DOP should be able to tell the story just with the shot selection, how you frame actors can tell a huge amount about their relations and emotions and so on.

The editing... Just... Wow. Equal to cinematography. So many shots were utterly pointless and just throw you out, they stand out for all the wrong reasons.

All goes back to the direction: did I mention BOOBS? Yeah because they helped the story... Maybe they were the story, three boobs decided to... Waste their and everyone else's time, all the way to this present day.

And I love that almost all the positive reviews on here are clearly from the same person, all around the same date, all written in the same flawed English and grammatical structure. That amused me greatly.

Don't get me wrong, I love this genre, but I really really want the filmmaker to grow, and learn from his mistakes. And I never even mentioned the sound... Obviously radio mics were above the budget which went on clean costumes (or were they via re-enactors?) and OTT/ unnecessary makeup.

I did however quite like the locations, when believable / historically believable.

Well done for trying.

All the reviews fail to mention that for all its short-comings, there are a couple of redeeming features, in the first 5 minutes anyway, I didn't make it past the 2 man battle for the castle sheltering Queen Elinor of Aquitaine.

But in that 5 minutes the featured character is Queen Elinor. She does have a nice set of tits (they look natural, because they have a lot of natural sag, but good heft and healthy sized nipples that point in the correct directions, unlike a lot of fake ones).

Other than that, the movie is pretty much a waste of time. When she puts on some clothes it's time to close the VLC window and move on to something with better acting, plot and production values (and better nudity), like say The Room or The Canyons.

I literally quit after 5 minutes it was that bad - and I've watched some pretty crappy movies. It felt like a high school drama production with boobs.