DVD Review : The Lost Legion (2014)

  Normally I put the back-cover blurb in here but since it's rather economical with the truth, I shall instead give you a quick rundown of  what "The Lost Legion" is really about.

 Pannonia 475AD

 In the dying days of the Roman Empire, Governer Maximus Antonius Albanis is in need of allies against the barbarian horde who've set up home next door.
 Since Suevi warlord Taranis and his wife Gisa are also looking for some military support, an alliance seems like a good idea for everybody concerned.

 What Maximus doesn't know is that his wife has a plan to put her obnoxious son on the Imperial throne.

And it doesn't involve Maximus or the Suevi.

 I wanted to like this film. I really did.

The opening scene was promising: A group of Romans and Suevi are escorting a beautiful young woman through a forest when they are jumped by fur-clad yobboes.
 At which point the lovely Gisa leaps off her palanquin. grabs a mace and begins twatting bad guys with enthusiasm and panache. "Ok" I thought "This could be fun."

 Sadly the Lost Legion never quite lives up to that initial potential.  

 I have this theory that somebody had been binge-watching  Spartacus on Netflix and went "Bloodshed, boobs and backstabbing...I could do that."
 Boobs and backstabbing there are a-plenty. If there isn't a pair of bare breasts on display, give it ten minutes and the next scene will make up for it. Meanwhile the Romans are unable to speak an entire sentence without 4-letter words and come across as spectacularly short-sighted. When you have 10,000 Goths over the road sharpening their axes, arguing over who is in charge seems a bit dumb

 You have to wonder if the real  Empire might have lasted a bit longer if the Romans weren't so terminally addicted to knifing each other in the ribs.

 Bloodshed? Not as much as you'd expect from the cover. After the inital punch-up things mostly settle down to verbal sparring which only occasionally escalates to drawn swords.
  You do get to see somebody beaten to death with a particularly novel blunt instrument though. I'm not going to go into details but you'll either be horrified or burst out laughing.

  So far this sounds like the sort of thing I should love. Certainly all the ingredients are there: Gratuitous boobage, Romans coming up with creative ways to say "fuck off and die", and of course the definite possibility that we're going to see lots of angry Germans running amok. But for some reason it just doesn't work.

 The actors are mostly decent -with one glaring exception who made me wince every time he opened his mouth -  and somebody has done a bit of research so "Lost Legion" at least tries to be historically correct.
  So why didn't I get into this film? I'm not entirely sure.
Ok, so if you've seen "Spartacus" or even "Rome" then this does seem awfully familiar and having the one guy you might actually root for offstage for most of the middle third struck me as a tactical error.
It would have been nice to see more of warrior-princess Gisa too.
Um, not in that sense. Lord knows you couldn't see any more of her without a Triple-x rating. I mean that I was hoping to see more of her in action.
No... wait... that's not quite what I meant either.

Look, I wanted to see more of Gisa with a sword in her hand....

Stop sniggering, godammit.  

Then there's the ending. Now that did piss me off.

 At the risk of giving too much away, the climax I was expecting came and went without actually being climactic and the film kept going, only to wrap up a couple of scenes later with things left undecided.
  I don't mind it when a film leaves me asking "What happened next?" but I get annoyed when a film suddenly decides "Screw it. We had another 40 minutes planned but we ran out of money and can't be bothered anyway."
 Maybe you shouldn't have spent so much time faffing about earlier then, huh?

Maybe the team were deliberately going for a downbeat, cynical ending.

Maybe I should have just picked up that DVD about the killer cheerleaders instead.

To sum up. Some decent ideas, some decent acting - one guy excepted, You know who you are - but not as good as it could have been.

That's all folks