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Shelf Beauties
by Willie Waffle
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Pathfinder
Pathfinder is so bad, I was
hoping everyone would die in the end, so I wouldn’t have to
sit through a
sequel.
Set in the late
800’s/early
900’s A.D., Karl Urban stars as a buff guy (in the credits,
they call him
Ghost, but he’s never referred to as Ghost in the movie. Most of the characters in
this film do not
really have names, so we will soldier on and try to identify people as
best we
can). "Ghost" was a
young Viking child found
by North American Indians and raised as one of their own after an
invasion by
the Vikings Years
later, the Norsemen are
back to plunder and pillage, and Ghost wants revenge on them after they
kill the
kind woman who raised him as her own, even as others in the tribe
refuse to
accept him.
Will Ghost be able to kill
all of the Vikings? Will
anyone be moved
to help? Will they think he is helping the Vikings?
I knew I was in trouble over
Easter weekend, when I saw an internet ad for Pathfinder. The ad was simple. It displayed the word,
“Pathfinder”.
Then, it displayed the MPAA’s ratings
symbol
indicating Pathfinder is rated R for strong brutal violence throughout. Then, in case you missed
it, the words,
“STRONG”, “BRUTAL”,
“VIOLENCE”, “THROUGHOUT” are
flashed on the screen one by
one as big as possible. It
turns out the
only thing going for Pathfinder is an audience’s blood lust,
but with so many
options out there to choose from, one would have to have the bloodlust
of Count
Dracula to search out this movie to satisfy it.
Pathfinder is a painfully
boring, nonsensical, badly made movie that doesn’t even
inspire ridicule and
mockery. Director
Marcus Nispel presents
a hodge podge of a film so horribly edited you have to wonder how bad
the
original cut was to make anyone think this result was an improvement. Characters reappear and
disappear without
reason. You get the
feeling a reel or
two are missing as scenes splice together in ways that don’t
make sense, and
Ghost starts to execute plans to fight the Vikings, but we
don’t see the
plotting or how he has convinced others to participate (after trying to
shun
them for their own protection earlier in the movie).
Nispel tries to compensate for the overall
cheapness of the production by giving us plenty of quick shots of
decapitations,
people getting stabbed, and lots of blood spurting all over the place,
but none
of the fight scenes have a rhythm or can be followed.
Even the fake snow looks very, very, very phony,
and when you notice how fake the snow looks, you know you have stopped
paying
attention to story and acting.
Furthermore, the producers
of Pathfinder must have purchased the script by the word, and suffered
a budget
crisis half way through. Pathfinder
relies on constant action to keep us interested, but loses the audience
when
the Vikings start speaking in some sort of old Viking language, and you
have to
read the subtitles to see what they are saying.
However, the North American Indians, who
I’m fairly sure never spoke
English, do speak English in the movie.
This is fine when we have scenes of Ghost among the
tribe, but he spends
long periods of time alone in the wilderness, then starts interacting
with the
Vikings, which means all of those subtitles are just slapping you
across the
face like you are the cheesiest guy in the bar.
Why not have everyone speak English since no one did
anyway and no one
in the audience or on the crew cares about historical accuracy as much
as
swords slicing off body parts?
Ultimately, Pathfinder is an
uninspired movie going through the motions.
0
Waffles (Out Of 4)
Pathfinder is
rated R for STRONG BRUTAL VIOLENCE THROUGHOUT.
Copyright
2007 - WaffleMovies.com
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