At first, when I saw a promo for it, I thought this movie was going to be a parody, like Meet the Spartans, I mean, seriously? A movie called Ironclad starring the dude from Sideways? It was actually a user review here at IMDb that was totally ripping on it, describing a scene in which a guy beats another guy over the head with a severed arm, that convinced me to give it a chance. I'm glad I did. It's definitely not a comedy and Paul Giamatti seriously gives it his all as a slimy king who thinks torturing people is the only way he can remain in power. The real thing Ironclad has going for it, among so many other medieval sword fighting epics, is its brutality, so I'm wondering why it didn't go a few steps farther and be the Caligula of our times. Don't get me wrong, it's plenty brutal. People get sliced in half, arms and feet are cut off, heads get hit with iron balls and splatter all over the place. Actually though, there is a nice combination of gory battle scenes and hokey Shakespearean drama. I think what would have helped the plot is if our rag tag group of twenty men fighting against an army of a thousand actually had a plan. That's what made great battle movies like Braveheart or Seven Samurai so intriguing, knowing that the underdogs could actually outwit their opponents. But here it's just brute strength and it's not always convincing. I mean, they knew the army would eventually come through that door, so why not dig a big pit behind it filled with poison spikes or a pool of acid or something? But overall, for a two hour movie, I have to admit, I wasn't bored once, and when I got interrupted in the middle of it, I was anxious to get back to it. Ironclad was a pleasant surprise, and when I say pleasant, I mean the type of pleasant during which a priest gets his tongue cut off or a guy gets an ax shoved into his crotch. That type of pleasant surprise, you know? Oh, and also hokey lines like, "I fight, so that you don't have to," offering some unintended laughs between the hot tar splashed in people's faces.
Review of Ironclad
