Centurion: Army of one

Neil Marshall's lean, mean Roman epic Centurion (now On Demand) features exactly one fight sequence that’s any fun. That’s not a complaint. The violence in the film is as ugly as it is barbaric. The first blow cauterizes your empathy muscles, but you never quite get used to the sight of a sword or an arrow slicing through a man’s head. Or maybe you do. Different strokes.

Regardless, Marshall's confrontational approach to violence immediately distinguishes Centurion from its rah rah sword-and-sandals sperm donors—300, Braveheart, Gladiator—but the film just as often settles for expectation, violating the Monochrome Accords that everyone signed in 1996 as a way to signify History only for the scarlet splatter of blood. Maybe the characters not played by Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, and Imogen Poots are thinly drawn because they’re archetypal, and maybe the plot lunacies like a woman’s scream pervading an entire valley are grasps at the stuff of legend. After all, the parts that aren’t retreads of men-on-a-mission and behind-enemy-lines flicks are ripped violently from The Metamorphoses, Titus Andronicus, and of course Joseph Campbell. But the film doesn’t quite achieve its potential until the finale, a mournful paean to the soldier beginning with a symphonic last stand where Marshall gradually weaves three isolated sequences together to a climax of double penetration. If you catch his drift.

Which is only the beginning of the film’s ascent. To this point, Centurion is an ode to the soldiering life, valiant but standard. It’s vulgar and raunchy and macho and brave. It tests its heroes and glorifies their victories. Its opening suggests it’s interested in geopolitical movements and specifically counterinsurgency strategy, but these are just glances at topicality; Centurion lives and dies with its men.

But then the film aspires to more, gathering each of its loose ends into a volley of emotional appeals that compensate for its shallow argument. We’re so wrapped up we barely realize that the coda, begging to be used as evidence against both inadequately prepared conquest and cut-and-run abandonment, says only one thing clearly: support our troops. Having beaten us with socks full of soap and earned our loyalty to Michael Fassbender, Marshall leaves us with a bumper sticker, and we take it for myth.