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 drained out colour photography looks like a masterstroke of ethereal atmospherics, but this also wears off and only compounds the overall feeling of monotony that pervades the pic.

Hugely disappointing venture from a director capable of so much more. 3/10

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 doesnt go as planned.

The movie definitely LOOKS and SOUNDS awesome with an ambient score reminiscent of Agalloch, but without the heavy riffing or manic drumming. Its an artsy non-blockbuster with a tone akin to "Aguirre, The Wrath of God" (1972) and "Black Robe" (1991). Apocalypto (2006) is a good modern comparison, although the story isn't as compelling as Black Robe or Apocalypto. It has elements ...

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) '<a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/the-northman/" rel="nofollow">The Northman</a>', 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 chapter breaks, is also a negative.

As mentioned already, a mute Mikkelsen is completedly wasted... may as well have cast Joe Bloggs. The rest of the cast have very little to work with either, though minutely interesting to see Gary Lewis and Jamie Sives inv...