Albion: The Enchanted Stallion

First off, the dialogue was hilarious and probably improvised on the fly with the help of John Cleese. It was very Pythonesc and fans of the Holy Grail would get a kick out of many of the scenes. Unfortunately, what the film needed was a faster pace and probably a more visionary director who could have taken this film to become the next Time Bandits. I did enjoy what I got, but couldn't help but see what this movie could have been.

I have long complained of the lack of truly great films in the last several years. There have been countless popular films that are entirely devoid of creativity that play to the audience's ignorance and basest nature. Films rife with titillation for the sake of selling tickets, a level of gore well beyond what is necessary to tell the story, stories that are weaker than wet paper, beautiful actors who can memorize lines but are unable to actually act.

Albion is not one of those. I got the film for my children expecting to be bored, sickened by the heavy-handed message, or irritated by an insipid production. I was so completely glad to be wrong. The film is visually stunning in many parts. The story is simple, relying on fantasy, fable, and myth for character archetypes as well as storyline. Refreshingly, the villain is not misunderstood or a shade of grey, he's just plain bad and the heroes are good.

It is a movie about hope, redemption, and love conquering all. Albion will be part of our family video library.

If you are one of those people who think obvious plot twists are clever, think that concepts of Good and Bad are trite, or believe that the world should be seen in shades of grey, this movie is not for you.

Camera, lighting, art dept & locations looked great! Unfortunately, the overall storytelling & tone lacked a steady hand. Great work by the editor BTW who cut nonsensical scenes together coherently. The pacing is maddening as new characters are introduced too fast to grasp all the new lore they try to add with walls of exposition. Costumes look like they were made or bought yesterday. Story jumped all over the place from present day to dreamscapes to fantasy world to portal to music montages and more. I'm not sure what this was supposed to be- Comedy? Adventure?

A suggestion to the "movie critics" here: when you intentionally choose to watch a film made for children and younger teens, it's a little goofy to rate it low because it turns out to be a film for children and young teens-- and doesn't meet your personal expectations of cerebral cinema. Seriously.

This is a terrific film that is well-written, well-directed, and above all well-acted. Every actor in this film pulls of his/her part with the perfect mixture of seriousness and humor. From the heroine to the rather horrid General (ugh, Cleese pulled that off abhorrently well), every role in this was nicely played. Liam McIntyre nearly stole the show as the evil henchman... except the other actors were quite good as well.

It would be a mistake to take this film too seriously. It was obviously intended as a dark comedy for the younger set. Young and teenage girls will likely love the horse theme. But older ones of both genders might appreciate the humor, the morality play, the story-lesson, and overall quality of the movie.

Is it perfect? No of course not. If one expected perfection going in, that would be somewhat delusional. Ranting at a kid's film for being a kid's film is one of those duh things. This is exactly what it's presented to be, achieved its goal, and was enjoyable all the way through. The ending was somewhat predictable and cliche, but was anyone really expecting anything different? Overall this is a decent family film and a fun watch.

I quite liked it, but I usually like most fairytale films.. sure, it's no masterpiece, plenty of flaws and you can tell this film didn't have the highest budget, (the make up in particular is horrendous) but all in all an entertaining, adventurous fairytale film. There was one thing that really bothered me though: Debra Messing. Oh boy was that a big casting mistake! She was nowhere near an Irish or Scottish, or whatever she was going for, accent. She painfully destroyed every scene she was in. Other than that - great fun!