FANTASIA 2011: IRONCLAD Review

"What a tedious little man!" snarls Brian Cox after dealing-slash-politicking against Paul Giamatti for the hearts and minds of the British peasantry.  Far from it, to enjoy Ironclad is to embrace one of the most ridiculous, yet delightful moments of over-the-top royalty since Graham Chapman and the Pythons (clearly a film that Ironclad is subtly nodding at while its plethora of arterial sprays and limb severings, even as it plays everything else decidedly straight.)  Giamatti and Cox join a host of celebrated English capital "A" actors such as Charles Dance and Derek Jacobi along to occasionally bark at each other through its orgy of violence.  The film is hilarious, yet deadly earnest, the type of bloody heroic wet dream of 14 year olds, with the type of posturing put forth by the WWE or Mel Gibson.  

 

A romantic subplot is clumsily shoe-horned between the local Lord's (Jacobi channelling Claudius without the stutter)  young and unsatisfied wife, played tediously and far to prettily by Kate Mara and the chaste Templar mainly her stroking his sword, while he hastily tries to put it back into the scabbard.   No, I'm not kidding.  It's comedy gold.  Why this is going while on a dozen or so survivors are being starved to death by the encircling army both look hale and pretty and movie star like.  Mainly though, the Knight Templar wants to stick is sword into swarthy the swarthy Dane (Vladimir Kulich) and there is an epic sweaty tango there, but I don't think the (t)horny metaphor is on hand for that one.  But a movie like this is not aiming to be high art, it is going to entertain with over-the-top acts of heroism and beating the enemy over the head with his own severed arm.  On that count, the film delivers in an very old-school, matinee fashion.  Sir Brian Cox's squire upon the witnessing the bloody first defense of Rochester's walls comments, "Nobody could recover after witnessing bloodshed such this as this."  But when the film earns a few unintentional laughs at the earnestness to which it  strives for but never quite achieves, you will likely recover and ask for more!  You may even want to gather a few of your movie going mates by your side and some over-sized beers to enjoy the slick carnage.  Ironclad is unpretentious entertainment loudly realized by falling on the sword of its own pretentiousness.   Somehow by the end of the film it has hit all of its cliche (yet fist pumping) character notes, done everything you might expect of it, only to win you aboard.  With David Gordon Green's Your Highness coming out to take the piss out of this type self-serious fantasy movie, Jonathan English has proven that you can have your cake and eat it too.