‘A great deal of this actually happened,” reads the title card at the start of this action-packed historical epic. Possibly. But it’s unlikely that anyone actually said these words. Like an episode of Game of Thrones scripted by Guy Ritchie, there is a laddish finesse to the dialogue in this 16th-century tale of backstabbing and beheadings. “That sounds like a load of bollocks,” splutters the Danish king Christian II to an adviser in one scene. The actors are mostly Danes and Swedes speaking lines in English, plus a few Brits with a slight Scandi tinge to their accents.
The film is based on real events: the mass killing of Swedish nobles in 1520, ordered by Danish king Christian II (Claes Bang). The script gives history a revisionist twist or two: namely by adding a pair of aristocratic Swedish sisters, beautiful Anne (Sophie Cookson) and skilled hunter Freja (Alba August). The film opens with a massacre at Anne’s wedding perpetrated by King Christian’s attack dogs. The villains are all introduced with geezerish-gangster nicknames: there’s Didrik Slagheck (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) “AKA evilman”. Another is “guy with scar”.
The movie becomes semi-interesting when the sisters arrive at the Swedish court where Emily Beecham is terrific as Kristina, the widow of the late Swedish regent, scheming to free her country from Christian’s clutches. And director Mikael Håfström doesn’t skimp on CGI spectacle in the bloody battle scenes. Some grisly moments, like the stabbing of a baddie through the eyeball with an icicle, are clearly sourced from the annals of action movies rather than historical record. But the film is too much of a clunker to achieve the virtue of being cheerfully ridiculous, the dialogue crossing the line from tongue-in-cheek to risible in places. Here’s Christina inviting Anne for some 16th-century spa action: “Let’s have a girls-only day. No children. No war.”
Source: theguardian.com
