Although his understanding of English history can be a little ’fantasy’, “Solomon Kane” is a powerful, high-spirited romp – with equally high production values – through the realms of fantasy genre more popular.
Basing his hero in a character dreamed during the Great Depression “Conan the Barbarian” creator Robert E. Howard, writer-director Michael J. Bassett has given us a full show that fascinates children and adults.
James Purefoy, who shone in togafest pedestrian HBO’s “Rome”, is reincarnated the unlikely name of Kane in a totally convincing. When the film opens, Kane is a con man of legendary proportions, but realizes, after a non-traumatic confrontation that does not clean up its act if it is going straight to hell. Become an errant penitent, and is connected to a beautiful family as dangerous outlaws traveling across England to emigrate to the New World, whose daughter is played by the even more beautiful Rachel Hurd-Wood.
Very bad things happen to this family very nice and from that moment on, the plot take the formulas, but still effective, the trajectory of a man who has foresworn violence, but pushed to the breaking point, ends up planting a public Mountain chaotic meeting of his opponent.
The film is ostensibly set in 1600 when, after all, the powers of Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare were at their highest point, but Bassett has chosen to represent the period in terms of belief in witchcraft and its general wickedness, as if materialize 800 years earlier, during the Middle Ages. (In any case, one can safely assume that the vast majority of the audience of this film you will not notice the problem of chronology.)
The costumes and set design are first rate and very suggestive, and the numerous battle scenes are gruesome scenes, with a smooth taste that will provoke applause from the fans.
As the ballast is an interesting subtext religious complex, sin and redemption, a belief system that is the product of an era still on the outlook for the devil and his coven of witches always busy. The audience wants something more than Gore will be fascinated by the arcane cabalistic symbols written on the body of Solomon and others and for many other events that take primitive Christianity.
Bassett is very good with the discreet use of powerful visual images (masks of birds, crucifixions), although perhaps a little ’too partial to rain, washing everything and everyone in the film. Is not a species characteristic of rain, but rather the kind that only deepens the misery and sometimes threaten to make the audience miserable as well.
At the end of the film, Bassett goes over the top, with the introduction of unnecessary end of a monster that looks like a cross between Godzilla and King Kong as if it were not entirely convinced of the strength of its material and its yield to it. But he does not need to worry about, and as part of a show overwhelming, as “Solomon Kane”, this small defect can be ignored.
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