User Reviews

I'll be honest. I had High hopes for this movie. I love the story of Boudica, I even have Cos-played her and told many a people the story of Boudica. But this movie is a hot blood splattered mess.

The History Channel Barbarians Docu-Drama is better than this. And the 2003 movie with Emily Blunt as a no body character is more accurate and better.

The movie had a great idea and story, and ruined it. This is closer to the old Fantasy Movie of The Sword and the Sorcerer, than to even a half right movie about a great Heroin of Britain. I'll call it a Prequal to Excalibur. The "Magical Flying, Dancing, Singing Sword that gets broken, thrown into a lake, only to be retrieved by the Lady of the lake... well sort of... It was Boudica not Boudica as she only adopts the name from a mystical prophecy name, jumping into retrieve it and it was now not broken.

When attacking Camulodunum (I think they call it Camlus in the movie) The actors stood in front of a screen of bad AI art of a badly done city, ran at it and then burned it) Next was London or as it was called then Londinium. It was just BAAAAAHHHHD (Reference to sheep fur being worn)

The two Ghost daughters... Oye. Just bad.

There are a bunch of un-employed Vikings actors in this. I think they needed work and took the job and had bad acting roles. Vikings as un-historical as it is, was still more historical than this bloody hot mess.

I can only give it 2 Magical Flying Swords.

Film starts off pretty well. Always interesting to dramatise a period of Welsh/Roman history that there is scarse documentation about. However, as soon as she becomes Boudica, it's begins to spiral into a lot of confusion. There's a sword that becomes magic. The 'new guy' - from Vikings fame, seems to spend the rest of the film saying 'Boudica'. He's a terrible actor but seems to have been led astray by terrible direction.

As gory as it is, they seemed to have shied away from the historical accounts of Boudica's savagery, (in particular to Roman women) which I won't describe but can be looked up.

In the end it's a failure. The lead actress, though beautiful as a Queen, looks comical as Boudica and can barely hold up the magical sword she's apparently able to wage war with. Truly bizarre.

A shame as there are few films that have ever been able to tell the Boudica tale with the dignity she deserves.

Well, I certainly didn't expect to see Olga Kurylenko in the role of this very famous British heroin of ancient times, and in fact, at the beginning of the movie I was almost about to call it quits right there and then, since all I could think about were certain mellow and sugary sweet scenes in "Gladiator".

But while in "Gladiator" such scenes were justified by the background story of its hero, here they seemed completely out of order.

This said though, once the true action did finally set in, with the arrival of the Romans and the onslaught they brought with them, the movie started to become quite interesting and even Olga gave a decent interpretation of Boudica (or Boadicea).

Granted, if you came in to watch a factual historic drama then you may have chosen the wrong movie.

This is more a reworked "Legend of", rather than "History of" the famed Warrior Queen, and as such I might even concur with its detractors, since I too had high hopes to actually see a serious historic biopic of the lady, but it seems that every movie maker wants a fairy tale, rather than stick to historic fact. So be it.

So, why on heaven's sake did I give it seven out of ten?

Simple. I liked the two thirds that came after the disjointed first act, despite being once again more legend and dramatic license rather than truly a decent biopic.

But for that one may probably have to resort to a decent mini-series on a streaming media and producer, if ever there will be one. Let's cross our fingers.

But among all the many depictions of Boudica, both filmed for TV or in movie format, there was even one back in the 1960s which was not that bad.

Still, the battle scenes and the brutality on both sides stem from actual historic fact, and just for that, their depictions seem quite accurate indeed.

Besides, the length of the movie betrays the fact that it is not truly destined to become a box office blockbuster, since otherwise more investment should have been made to have a two and a half or three hour movie, which indeed would have been better, and would have enabled the writers and the director to go deeper into historic fact and do more accurate research, despite the opening that guarantees you that it is based on period writings, which it is indeed not. At least not as it should have been.

Still the cast in general manages to hold together in this re-imagined figure of Boudica and even help Olga Kurylenko to hold it all together.

In my view, this is not a bad movie, nor is it a good one. It is a mediocre attempt to bring back such a figure and imagining her as a superhero, which she probably indeed was, at least for the Britons.

It is one of those movies to watch with a grain of salt and not to make too much out of it, since as I said, a true biopic or history drama it is certainly not.

It is particularly good when nothing else seems to be around being of interest.

In other terms, it is good for simple entertainment and fill an afternoon or an evening with something different, and as such it works.

My dearest hope though would be to finally see someone a la Ridley Scott, coming up with finally a well researched and seriously adapted history of the woman called Boudica and her real presence in ancient times.

Besides, Boudica was never killed on the battlefield and instead either died of an illness or simply out of old age.

Again, and as always, it is up to you, the viewer, to decide whether this movie is worth your time.

This film deviates from the historical record quite a bit. In this version, the Romans kill Prasutugas in an ambush. Boudica's daughters are murdered, not raped, but appear as motivating spirits to her. Paulinus is not on Anglesey fighting Druids: he is in Rome speaking to Nero in a disapproving tone. Nero rather undramatically kills himself because of Boudica. And so on.... Altogether it is kind of stupid.

Olga is very pretty, but her dialog here is badly written, so her performance is nowhere as good as in "Centurian." Also, Boudica is stereotyped as having red hair: here it is brown? The rest of the cast is forgettable, except the cute little girls (Boudica's daughters) who actually turn in among the better performances. I appreciate that CGI usage is limited, but the production has a very low budget feel. You can tell that they didn't have epic numbers of extras. Instead of Boudica's final battle fielding 200k Britains, it looks like she has a gang of about a dozen. The final battle is so badly staged, and filmed as if it is a black comedy. Paulinus apparently knows who Boudica is although he has been in Rome, and nods sadly from a mountaintop vantage point when she is killed a la Julius Caesar.

Boudica is a fascinating historical figure. This film is not the place to learn about her or her cause. It really is a hot mess.

How difficult can it be to write a decent screenplay about Boudicca? How can they get it SO wrong? An historic icon. A great Queen. And she's ended up with this! They even get the ending wrong. She was not butchered by the Romans. She poisoned herself, preserving her dignity & dying in freedom.

Sheesh. This is gory inaccurate rubbish. It follows what are believed to be the main events of Boudicca & her tribes but the interpretation is wildly wide of the mark.

There are acronyms such as "I reckon", dead daughters (in reality they probably fought alongside Boudicca), an Excalibur type sword & some weird characters who seem to have remarkable insight. This is unlike Boudicca herself who comes across as a naive idiot who relies on the advice of her dead daughters.

What a huge disappointment. If you must watch it, settle down with some mates, a bottle of wine & have a good laugh of the inanity of it all.

This is another complete mess of a story about the Boudica rebellion. This time Kurylenko takes on the role and for me I think she may be a slight improvement over Alex Kingston in that she's at least given some character development and something to grow into. The film though actually manages to feel very rushed so that her transition from noble high-born lady to insurgent and warrior queen feels very abrupt. I did though find her at least convincing in the early scenes and I thought she was able to pull off the early role with some style and convey that sense of intelligence, dignity and understanding that surely a Queen of this time would have needed. The opening scene is actually okay featuring an artistic approach with good use of light and shadow as roman soldiers march past us, there's atmosphere and mystery to it and it's a shame the rest of the film doesn't convey that. One of the first major clangers quickly lands though with a prophecy that the romans will be thrown out of Britain by a powerful female leader. Nero reacting to this immediately decrees no woman may hold a position of power, lighting the fuse for what then follows. Total bunk but this film is only just getting started. We spend some time now with Boudica and I must say her very small tribe, why are there only about 10 people around? Where is everyone? That would have been about one family back then. Anyway they live in a somewhat privileged position, and tutor their daughters in Latin, she has access to makeup and expensive clothing so it's not a bad life it seems. One scene though that bothered me had some rather modern looking windows placed behind her. In another historical clanger we see British Christians being arrested and punished, the persecutions of Nero are unlikely to have reached Britan where the romans had appeared only 10 years before, it doesn't work. We get a quick introduction to a female warrior character dressed up to look like something from the suicide squad. As you'd expect the Brits are portrayed as warm, humble, straight forward and decent, the romans are greedy, cruel and violent. The flogging scene is quite violent but also quick. The film makes a strange choice in changing the fate of her two daughters and it's just baffling really why they do this other than to do some kind of strange Sixth Sense like scenes. Some of the acting I thought just wasn't that good from the roman characters. In another scene perhaps intended to rip off King Arthur she retrieves a magic sword from a lake, this sword even flies into her hand on command, like something out of Thor, it's such a laughably bad choice and perhaps shows how infantilised audiences have become now that the writers felt they couldn't tell this story without a magic sword flying around like it's Harry Potter or something. By this point the film is now in desperate trouble and struggling to save itself from becoming an outright joke. Things do improve though, a few scenes are either nicely edited, or you may just think they are saving on money, but we have her slap on the war paint and transform into the insurgent queen ready to take on the roman forces. The sack of a couple of towns is competently done much better than the 2003 version which showed them mainly attacking about 10 romans behind a piece of wood. There's a little internal power struggle going on within her camp but not enough, they really should have showed how hard she had to work to keep the different tribes with her. We do though get the odd scene of various male Brits doubting her and so on. I must say the dialogue was fairly bad, the ghost children showing up to tell her whatever she needed to know was especially bad. The history isn't even close to being accurate in large part, Nero did not kill himself because of the revolt, no writer has ever suggested that and the dates do not match at all. Nor was a new force landed in Britain to put down the rebellion. The final battle is a real disappointment, not even close to what really happened, why does she only have 40 warriors with her too for the final battle. Unlike the historical Boudica this one goes down fighting in the end. What I still couldn't get my head around though was all the mystic mumbo jumbo we were forced to sit through before getting there. Some of the fight sequences had a hard violent edge to them which was good but it's never explained how she goes from high born noblewoman to natural killer in just 2 minutes, it's in her blood I suppose. The film presents a pretty one-sided perspective to the story, not that this is a bad thing but it would have been interesting to understand a bit more about how the romans tried to respond. Again her speeches fall pretty flat, and some of the dialogue is awkward. The history is poor in parts with her army at the end largely picked off by archery before we are treated to a mixture of Bormir's death in LOTR and Butch Casidy. They even try and pull a Gladiator at the end with this idea now she's actually delighted to be able to go off and join her family in the afterlife. It's like the final nail in the coffin for this and an idea of just how inaccurate and lazy it was in how it was put together. A shame because I do love a story set in this time, some of the costumes were quite well done and the cinematography, editing and fight sequences were probably the best part about it. So in the end an ever so slight improvement over the 2003 with it's almost comical Zeena/Merlin approach to things, combined with a flat and stale look. This at least improves over that, yet still it's grossly inaccurate and muddled none the less. I will say too that having an all-white cast is not an easy thing to do now in 2023, but it gives it a kind of authenticity getting rarer now.