Le Guerrier silencieux, Valhalla Rising

It never manages to rise above its one trick. Nicolas Winding Refn directs and Mads Mikkelsen stars in this ponderous exercise in arty veneers. Refn boldly strips back the dialogue and plot to reveal a picture big on ideas but poor in execution. As the story plods along, stopping only briefly for some guttural violence now and then, it becomes evident that the makers have made a painfully boring movie. At first the d...

Twilight of the grim, grey… um… RELEASED IN 2009 and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, "Valhalla Rising” takes place in the 11th century where a one-eyed mute thrall (Mads Mikkelsen) obtains his freedom in the Scottish Highlands and joins a band of Viking Christians on a voyage to the Holy Land to fight in the Crusades, but the expedition doesn’t go as planned. The movie definitely LOOKS and SOUNDS awesome with an am...

Rubbish! A true waste of 90 minutes... and of Mads Mikkelsen! It evidently attempts similar as to what we would later see in 2022 with (the excellent) 'The Northman', though simply falls flat in every department for me. The whole production just looks so cheap and low-budget (which it wasn't), without even noting the (admittedly intended) pure misery of the look of it all too. Editing, notably with the needless chapt...

67/100 As viewers, we ride along and observe an ex-slave / barbarian, a young boy, and a bunch of crusaders, as they travel from the Northern Highlands of Great Britain to North America sometime around 1100 AD. That's about the entire story in a nut shell. However, it's extremely authentic and exquisitely photographed. We get to know and understand the characters explicitly with little dialogue. As slow and somewhat...