SindarS

While the premise of this movie isn't terrible, the execution is very poor, since there doesn't appear to be a single original idea in its plot. It's your typical, one chieftain's son lays his eyes on another chieftain's daughter and they instantly fall in love. Then there's the big nemesis coming to destroy them all. Fortunately for our "heroes", he's an incompetent fool, who doesn't know how to fight peasants. In itself the script isn't terrible, if the dialogues are written well, and it's competently shot and edited - SPOILER - it's not.

The whole plot is a combination of Vikings meet 300 Spartans and Mongols crashing their party. Frankly, many of the story elements make no sense at all. It seems like half of the time the actors themselves don't know what's going on. Any potential historical story value was lost within the first 20 minutes. It's only made worse by terrible scene cuts. Whoever was writing or editing this thing obviously didn't know how geography works.

The good parts are the scenery shots and the costumes that look pretty good and authentic.

The acting isn't awful, but the writing is so terrible that none of the characters are likable. Also the actor selection is questionable - you get a whole range of accents that don't match the characters they're playing. The romance story is very artificial. The heroic speeches are awful and the dialogues in general aren't much better. The supposed emotional and heroic moments drag on for far too long and it's nothing but relief when they're over.

While the choreography of fight scenes is competent, they're a mixed bag - some look fine, some incredibly goofy.

The voice recording is terrible, at one point you can barely make out what the actors are saying while the horses take the center stage making their noises.

-SPOILER- The ending, however, is the worst of all - to stop the Mongol horde from advancing, the peasants decide to break the dam, and apparently, the best way is by standing inside the future river bed! I kid you not. Also, for some reason they need to drop the big rock thingy onto the dam, to break it, instead of just chopping at the dam itself that's made out of wood!

If anything, this movie is a masterclass of stupidity - between the subpar story and writing, the terrible scene cuts and artificial heroism, it's the dumb ending sequence that managed to kill it.

Accurate rating: 2.5*

This movie is like a "John Wick wannabe" with a female lead, but lacks any of John Wick's charm or polished quality and the result feels like a cheap knock-off. It seems more like a vanity project for Natalie Burn who plays the protagonist and is also the producer of this "marvel".

I've played video games that had more coherent storyline than this movie. It seems that somebody threw up on a piece of paper and called it a movie script. The movie never bothers explaining any backstory of the characters and the chaotic scene cuts don't help the story progression either. For its empty story, the movie has a surprisingly big cast. Granted, most of them are just mindless goons that are supposed to be unceremoniously killed off. For an action movie the fighting and shooting sequences are just laughable. So are the sound effects - they could just go: "pew-pew!".

The acting is awful across the board, but it's not like they had much to work with anyway. Sean Patrick Flanery just mumbles in incoherent sentences through the whole thing trying hard to be "the crazy bad guy" and Dolph Lundgren was relegated to sitting in a basement and looking at 3 computer screens for most of the movie. Unfortunately he is way past his prime like some other action movie stars from 80s and 90s.

It's not a completely amateur effort, so gets 2* for spending about 1/3 of the time driving around in Maserati, nice opening titles and some decent post-production effects.

So the premise of the movie is - when there are no superheroes left (namely, Superman) to save/protect the world, we should assemble a team of hot-headed bad guys to do the job. Just inject them with an explosive tracking device and we're set - what can go wrong, right? Oh, and apparently you just need a smartphone app to blow their heads off that you occasionally wave in their face to motivate them.

While the cast of the movie includes some prominent well-known names, the ensemble of their characters just doesn't work because of the poor writing.

The whole saga can be encapsulated within a few points:

• storyline, plot - nonsensical and barely any to speak of;
• characters - borrowed from a stash of stereotypical anti-heroes, also no development of their story-archs (a few flashback scenes at random times doesn't cut it);
• dialogues - almost unbearable and filled with one-liner clichés;
• Harley-Joker love (?) saga included just because we needed some weird abusive romance in this mess as well?
• soundtrack - feels more like a mix-tape of songs that play at random times without any regard to what happens on the screen.

All that combined amounts to an epic disaster, which to me felt more like a parody of a movie; or rather several movie trailers and teasers stitched together.

So until DC gets their act together and work on a coherent storyline in their Universe, this disaster won't be their last.