Some of you may have seen posters for this film and a few trailers, maybe.  Then with the blink of an eye it was out of theatres and gunning for a DVD release.  This happens all the time to Hollywood movies, especially epics that don’t really have a place in the Hollywood mantle.  “Pathfinder” being directed by Marcus Nispel, who is most known for the remake of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and starring Karl Urban who was in “Lord of the Rings” for a blip and a few action movies like “Doom.”  This film didn’t have a huge driving force behind it, except images of giant monster like Vikings being hacked up and swinging axes in the trailer.  So I’m guessing other than the fan boys, no one was excited to see the film and that’s why it was so poorly received.  It also took forever to be released; it sat on the shelf for over a year, which usually means the movie is too controversial or too mediocre.  So with no expectations and lots of bad press surrounding this film I sat down to watch it.  Here goes…

The film is about a young Viking boy left behind by his clan and raised by Native Americans.  He embraces their way of life and when his clan comes back to finish what they started he fights back.  There’s also a love story involved, but it was pretty boring and not really even worth mentioning.  All you really need to know going into this film is that tons of gargantuan monster looking Vikings with horns and huge beards slaughter lots of Native Americans and Ghost (the young Viking) decapitates a lot of Vikings.  The film borrows or I should say steals from every epic in the last three decades.  Even showing a shot of Ghost throwing his sword and it landing Braveheart style in the grass and swinging victoriously. 

But back to the Vikings, they look like monsters and are never really characterized more than just barbarians and pure evil.  So the film is very black and white, no grey here.  Vikings are evil pillagers and rapers; Ghost is the savior of the helpless Native Americans that’s pretty much it.  There is one scene where the Vikings are chasing Ghost as he sleds down a hill of snow on his shield and the Vikings get on these random antique sleds they just had lying around.  It is by far the silliest action sequence I have ever seen and I really have no idea what the filmmakers were thinking when they read this on the page let alone started actually filming it.  Some of the fight scenes are fun for a little bit, but the violence goes so over the top and silly that it’s hard to enjoy for extended periods.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Commentary by the director - Where he talks of how cool this movie was to shoot.  At least someone thought so.

Deleted scenes - If they were deleted from this film, chances are you’re not going to watch them all the way through.

A handful of featurettes that if you like the film will be interesting. If you were annoyed by it, then you’ll be even more annoyed by the attempt to justify certain choices.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This film is tolerable in parts and the action scenes can be fun for moments, but it always seems to dip into excess and silliness. Never really holding my attention as a serious epic, more like a film a child wrote because he thought Vikings were cool.  See it only if you really like violence for no purpose.