John McTiernan 1999: The 13th Warrior

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***
***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***

Fear reigns.

Out of the seven movies John McTiernan directed before The 13th Warrior, four of them were excellent and come highly recommended, one of them sits just below those and the other two, while not great movies are still fun to watch if you can't decide or haven't seen them before.

I had never seen The 13th Warrior before last night but I was very excited to watch it. How could the men responsible for Die Hard and Predator (McTiernan) and Jurassic Park and Sphere (Michael Crichton) make a bad movie. It seemed like sure fire box office gold. But when it was released in theaters it didn't do to well and I never got a chance to see it. Now 13 years later, I have watched it and boy oh boy was I disappointed.

The 13th Warrior is a bad movie. It is overlong, boring, has a bad script and isn't terribly well put together. It's as if McTiernan hadn't directed Die Hard or The Hunt for Red October, both classics, but instead was the helmer of such greats as Speed 2: Cruise Control or The General's Daughter. What went wrong with this movie? What happened to McTiernan?

To begin with, the story is just poor. I had read the book it was based on eons ago (probably close to 20 years now) and I wasn't enthralled by it. It wasn't one of Crichton's best. In the movie, Antonio Banderas is exiled from his homeland into Viking (?) territory where he is recruited into a gang of 13 warriors who must fight some devil like spirits. Except for one scene in the entire movie, the entire story is muddled, confusing and boring.

It begins with Banderas' exile but never references that again. It was a useless piece of information. It moves to the Viking village next where we meet the Vikings. We meet Buliwyf, the leader, who right away for no reason kills a guy. And like that we don't like him. Yet, as the movie progresses he turns out to be good. WTF? Then when we meet the evil spirits they move and jump and act like spirits. They are fast and walk on four legs and the bodies of their dead just up and disappear. It's all very mysterious but not 15 minutes later Banderas makes the discovery that they are just men in costumes. Again, WTF?

That's about it for coherence with the story and that isn't even that coherent. The rest is muddled and confusing and makes little to no sense. The ending is lack-luster and the action is too few and far between. As I mentioned earlier, there is only one scene that stood out in the movie. For the first 30 minutes of the movie, Banderas is lost in a world where he cannot speak the language of the Vikings. In a five minute montage sequence, we watch him sitting at a campfire (well many campfires over time) studying the lips of the Vikings. As the scene progresses, the language starts to sound more and more like English and by scene end everyone is speaking English, but not really. Like The Hunt for Red October, McTiernan has pulled off another great feat in making the characters speak in their actual tongue but in a way that the audience can understand.

Other than that scene, there is really only one thing that McTiernan did well in this picture and that is the costumes and make up. The Arabs look Arabic, the Vikings look like Vikings, and the spirits/men are well detailed and look menacing. And the blood and gore is very realistic; heads chopped off, blood spurting everywhere, limbs flying and deep gashes galore. It's nice to see McTiernan return to the R-Rated picture, it's just too bad it was this boring piece of drivel.

The acting is so so, the editing is ho hum and the cinematography is pretty but nothing special. The music is great but has the same problem that Conan the Barbarian had. It is epic and it is pulse- pounding and it is like this throughout the film. Even at times when it isn't needed it is there. It treats every scene as though it is an action piece, and there are few few action pieces as it is. In a word, the music is overbearing. It would work in something like  Predator where the action is relentless but in The 13th Warrior there needs to be a calm before the storm.

The 13th Warrior was a real disappointment. Having enjoyed or loved McTiernan's previous work I was shocked at how bad a job he did here. To be fair though, it might not be his fault. After a bad test screening and a negative response from Crichton, Crichton went out and shoot a bit more and re-edited the film himself, in essence 'firing' McTiernan. I'd like to believe, based on his past history, that McTiernan's The 13th Warrior was a far superior film before Crichton got his hands on it. But if what I hear of Rollerball is true then maybe I'm just being too kind. At any rate, don't waste your time with this film, watch something else instead.


Film Rating: 49%

Breakdown (How The 13th Warrior scored 49%):

Production Design: 6 out of 10
Cinematography: 6 out of 10
Re-playability: 3 out of 10
Originality: 4 out of 10
Costumes: 7 out of 10
Directing: 4 out of 10
Editing: 5 out of 10
Acting: 6 out of 10
Music: 6 out of 10
Script: 2 out of 10