I’m torn whether to recommend Michael J. Bassett’s Solomon Kane; on one hand, it’s a good-enough sword-and-sorcery tale, brutal and moody and atmospheric, leagues ahead of those campy 80s epics that killed off the genre: the Deathstalkers and Beastmasters and the rest of them. On the other hand, the climax is an almost unforgivable mess of substandard CGI that just about sinks the film.
Eh, call it home field advantage (the movie was filmed in and around Prague); I can give Solomon Kane a pass. Overlook the flaws – which, if you’re a genre fan, are really confined to the CGI and the lame ending – and you’ll have a blast here.
Kane is based on the long-popular character created by Robert E. Howard, the pulp writer who also created Conan the Barbarian before committing suicide at age 30. He’s a fascinating character: a 17th-Century Puritan who wanders the lands fighting evil; in the movie, he’s a once-vicious and evil warrior who attempts to renounce violence in order to save his soul.
When we first meet Kane (let’s ignore the obviously digital establishing shots that open the film and pop up throughout), he and his men are invading a castle in search of treasure and murdering all those in their path.
He gets more than he bargained for, however, when he comes face-to-face and sword-to-sword with the Devil’s Reaper, who has come to collect his soul (for reasons, uh, less than fully explained). It’s a dynamite opening, operating at a larger scale than the film’s budget would indicate, and sets the tone for the rest of the film.
Later, Kane (effectively played by James Purefoy with a Hugh Jackman-like swagger) has renounced his evil ways but is kicked out of the monastery that has served as his sanctuary (because, uh, one of the monks had a ‘vision’).
He begins a journey back to his home land, which he left as a child (in flashbacks, Max von Sydow plays his father), refusing to even defend himself against a gang of robbers. On his way, he encounters the benevolent Crowthorn family, headed by patriarch William (Pete Postlewaite), who offers to aid him in his journey.
But the lands are ravaged by evil, and soon Solomon finds himself drawn back into a world of violence, which he uses – for good, this time – to save his soul.
For the main plot thread in the film, the logistics of soul-taking and soul-saving are pretty thinly sketched; we seem to be going by hearsay most of the time, with the Reaper claiming Kane made a deal with the devil and lost his soul, and William saying he can do something else to save it. But at this point I’m looking too deep: it’s clear who is good and who is evil here, now let’s get down to the action.
In this regard, Solomon Kane doesn’t disappoint. Fights are brutal and bloody, and shot and edited in a manner that actually lends itself to visual comprehension. Imagine that, we can understand what’s happening.
It’s also appropriately creepy, with memorable characters like the Reaper and the mask-wearing Overlord, and one standout sequence involving a demented priest (MacKenzie Crook) and his brethren of cannibalistic post-humans.
But that ending, in which Kane squares off against a hulking mess of digital goo (the rest of the film, apart from the establishing shots, had avoided the overuse of CGI); it’s a real deal-breaker. It’s over with relatively quick, but I mourn what could have been.
