REHupa

Spitting Feathers;

or, Chewing Over the Unplucked Turkey that is

SOLOMON KANE

By

Richard Toogood

Any priests in the market for a fresh penance to dispense from their confessionals could, I suggest, do a lot worse than to consider directing the sinful to repeated viewings of SOLOMON KANE. Not because the film affords any sort of cogent insight into the nature of sin and redemption but because watching it amounts to the most painful form of punishment imaginable. For a Howard fan it makes for an atonement almost Torquemadan in its cruelty.

Now, of course, any film has the right to be judged on what it is rather than what it is not, and so one cannot simply dismiss SOLOMON KANE as a moronic travesty of its source material but that is only because there is nothing whatsoever of Robert E Howard in it; unless one elects to count the conscription of Kane’s vague conjecture voiced in “Blades of the Brotherhood”, that he seeks his “soul’s salvation, mayhap”, an idea interpreted by Michael Bassett’s inept and asinine script with quite boneheaded literalism.

There is also one passing mention of Kane having sailed with Admiral Drake, inserted, one suspects, purely for the benefit of the Howard cognoscenti. A touching concession perhaps, but one wholly misjudged because with Bassett having set his film, arbitrarily and to no fathomable purpose, in 1601 and Drake’s voyage of circumnavigation having been undertaken in 1577, then by my reckoning the relevant subtraction of years reduces the film’s Kane to Drake’s cabin boy rather than “Devon’s king of swords”.

The wretchedly confused setting is by far and away the most pressing of the film’s manifold problems. And it isn’t just the obvious crass anachronisms that betray Bassett’s lamentable lack of feel for period: the flying of a Union Jack years before it was designed for instance, the existence of a thriving community of monks more than sixty years after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a witch burning (witches were always hanged in England whatever Hammer films would have you believe) etc etc etc. The film is actually tailored and costumed as if for a remake of WICHFINDER GENERAL. Had the film indeed been set during the Civil War then the general anarchy that the film depicts could be considered plausible, but to suggest that the authoritarian state of Elizabeth 1 would ignore the wholesale ravaging of the entire West Country is patently absurd. Bassett’s historical research appears to have come courtesy of the sort of books that come complete with pop-up illustrations.

If Bassett’s grasp on history is limp then his grip on the socio-religious complexities of the period is positively flaccid.  It is painfully evident from the picture’s depiction that Bassett is utterly clueless as to what puritans actually were; something of a shortfall, if you ask me, when it is the ideology of such that is supposed to provide the moral compass for the film’s protagonist. And so in place of the rigid political conservatism and harsh moral strictures, for which they were synonymous, instead we get Pete Postlethwaite’s cheery band of proto-Quakers; just the kind of cinematic cannon fodder guaranteed to liberate a morbid and self-pitying Solomon Kane from his adopted pacifism.

Without the engine of Howard’s inventions to drive it, and lacking any coherent sense of period to sustain interest, the film is little more than a dull and dreary two hour slog through a tedious succession of blizzards and rain storms, interspersed with a positive wallowing in filth. The repetitive scenes of abused peasants being dragged through the mire cannot fail to evoke memories of a muddy Michael Palin complaining, “help, help, I’m being oppressed”.

Bassett’s plot affords few thrills and springs no surprises (only the lobotomized could ever be caught out by its revelations) and runs out steam approximately halfway through whereupon it simply repeats itself for the remainder of the run time. Unforgivably its wholly unnecessary, and painfully clichéd, attempt to explain Kane’s origins robs the audience of all but the most fleeting glimpses of the real Howard hero through the fog of Bassett’s crass conceits.

Technically the film is adequate; both the cinematography and the score are competent without being by any means memorable, although the effects are decidedly of the bargain basement variety only. Postlethwaite aside, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo by Max Von Sydow too, the support acting is little elevated beyond am-dram standard.

With so little else on offer to catch the eye it is fair to say that the film stands or falls on Purefoy’s central performance. And he is undoubtedly impressive when the dismal script compels him to be, although just why he felt compelled to affect laryngitis for the film’s entire duration escapes me. He is less successful in those sequences when Bassett’s incompetence requires him to affect a misplaced, and distinctly unKaneian, defeatism, self-pity or despair, ludicrously culminating in a meek submission to crucifixion in the film’s single most risible scene; a sequence as spectacularly misplaced as it is, quite literally, incompetently executed.

In general however Purefoy looks the part and even manages to employ the accent without coming across like a country bumpkin. Moreover he is terrific in the fight scenes and carries the exquisitely tailored costume well (a costume which we are expected to believe the film’s drippy heroine managed to run up overnight in the back of a wagon: I’m all for suspending disbelief Mr Bassett but don’t expect it to support elephants ).

In closing, I think few Howard fans would complain at seeing Purefoy in the big black hat again. Just so long as he comes unburdened by another puerile script and witless direction.

As for Mr Bassett: please go and ruin some other author’s characters and never darken Howardian doors again.

ends