Medieval (Movie)

Living up to its title, this ultraviolent ode to a Czech national hero bludgeons you into submission.A cohort of notable actors — including Michael Caine, Ben Foster and Matthew Goode — tromp through “Medieval,” Petr Jakl’s lumbering epic about the storied Czech warrior Jan Zizka. The movie’s real stars, though, are its gaping wounds and mangled limbs, the singing of scythe and ax more eloquent than any dialogue.On land and underwater, the verisimilitude of the violence is numbing. Horses are elbowed over cliffs; a man’s brain is leisurely puréed by means of a saw through the ears. By the end, scarcely an orifice remains inviolate, the camera’s blood lust seemingly insatiable. Yet beneath the clanging of chain mail and the gurgles of the dying, a story peeks out: The throne of the Holy Roman Empire is up for grabs and coveted by two feuding brothers. To prevent the corrupt sibling (Goode, lazily scheming) and his wealthy wing man from prevailing, a powerful lord (Caine) arranges to have the wing man’s fiancée, Lady Katherine (a wan Sophie Lowe), kidnapped. As operatic choirs muster on the soundtrack, a morose mercenary named Zizka (Foster), gets the assignment; a small empire’s worth of knights and peasants gets kaput.Glum and bludgeoning, “Medieval” serves up a melancholic hero — see how it pains Zizka to take all these lives! — and a limp love interest-cum-bargaining chip. Hauled from one battle to the next, Katherine can do little but gaze, mouth agape, at the carnage, rallying now and then to declaim on the era’s social inequities and to pack maggots into Zizka’s newly vacated eye socket.“Are you all right?” Zizka tenderly inquires at one point, though, if you ask me, the movie’s addition of that hungry lion was maybe a barbarism too far.MedievalRated R. Fans of slicing, smashing, gouging and impaling will be in heaven. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More