Last Knights

Last Knights

Last Knights sounds like a film that would be directed by Quinton Tarantino as it is an action film infused with style and swords. However, we do not see any decent action in this film.

You really don’t know how ‘Last Knights’ ever saw the light of day and how it got greenlit. Naturally of course, money was spent, and plenty of it too. The cast is filled with known names from various places so as to appeal to audiences from across the globe. Natural logic dictates this will mean the content has some special worth to warrant the muscling in of all those people at one place at one time. You’d be wrong.

The film is utterly and absolutely boring. An action epic it purports to be, most of the running time is taken by tiresome dialogue instead. It teases the audience of maybe having political aspects to it, but then chooses not to explore such plots. It tries to be a cinema meant for the masses across history and genre, but ends up being just badly made. ‘Last Knights’ is in short, an expensive mess. If only because it would explain why so many things seemed to go wrong on the set of the film, and whether it was all part of some twisted multi-million dollar tax scheme.

‘Last Knights’ is set in some undefinable point in the history which does not seem to have any future designation. It’s said to be an era of enormous battles, but somehow it does not appear to be based on any real war. It is the story of clans, of masters and of kingdoms that occupies all the peoples of the Earth into one imagines screen with genres from that of the samurai and medieval knights film.

Clive Owen acts as Raiden, an aced warrior who used to be a mere peasant child disowned by powers that be Bartok, Morgan Freeman, a master of territories of a kingdom or so. (It is really hard to figure out what is the structure of things in this stupid world the movie creates) Bartok is in fact the only honorable character in this insanity infested place who is also unfortunately afflicted with Freeman’s hermit tones along with Timothy Treadwell’s disgraceful beard that deprives the actor of all nerve to make his character authoritative.

One day, Bartok gets called to see a significant powerful henchman (Aksel Hennie) of this country’s kindly wicked emperor (Payman Maadi). This henchman asks for a bribe, and Bartok refuses to pay, and so issues arise. Migliara case reaches the emperor who hounds Raiden to kill his honorable lord to illustrate dominance for the rest of the individuals living in the land.

Things then break apart for Bartok and part of the Kingdom after his soldiers commanded by Raiden are vanquished. It appears evil has won after all the odds. Surely there is no prospective way for a just act of revenge to occur? You know what? Who cares? Who is even interested in what takes place later on?

This film really fell off at some point, but I am actually struggling to place where this film went off the rails and how out of the movies there was a magnificent such failure. For issues as chronologically wide-spread as the conception been to the almost unbearable medieval world or the idea of the movie.

This universe has no particular logic to speak of, these are just random visuals, ideas and story beats taken from epic movies that screenwriters thought would collage together via, you know, coherence. Once you get over the fact that the film’s world is illogical, you then learn to appreciate the crude story that follows it. Story, in (quotation marks), is still a strong word though.

That means that it’s not just a cheap screenwriting handbook with a three act story guide, and the writers did try to come up with something original.

The script does not afford any logic, or any excitement for that matter, or even shocks for that matter. It’s just an amalgamation of dry stereotypical scenes interchanged with idealistic markings of speech that are characteristic of yore and sound significant. It is not significant, though. It’ll all seem incredibly ludicrous, steadily culminating into what will be hailed as a shocking plot twist but which can be predicted at least half an hour in advance. Then like abject fools, the filmmakers use a still from the brilliant ending of The Usual Suspects to complete the gimmick. If I were them I would be embarrassed.

We now understand why B-grade stars from America, Britain, Denmark, Iran, South Korea, Israel, New Zealand and a few other states have been recruited to make a B level movie. A lot of money was spent on the film. Not that the actors are any good or do anything, of course. Most of them are trudging zombies through the rest of the action.

Owen appears to be so ashamed of being part of the project that he continually broods and glowers in the way he must have normally been on set. Freeman does his thing and achieves even half sleep would have sufficed. The only actor who can be understood is Hennie who is over the top as a villain hoping to gain attention for other English speaking movements but sadly it is surely a plight that extremely few people shall watch this disaster of a film and consequently support him in any way.

The travesty in question was Kaziaki Kiriya’s (‘Casshern’, ‘Goemon’) directed, probably because he’s made a couple of historical epics in the past that the producers were counting on him to turn their stupid screenplay into another one of those. Indeed he does make the film appear quite expensive with close-up shots of extras with soldiers spread throughout and large castles as backdrops. Unfortunately, he does constrain concerns, almost all of the action that so is supposed to be the central focus of this so-called epic till the last thirty minutes of the film.

When these action sequences finally arrive, they are not poorly shot or staged, but at this point, it is difficult to give a damn. If there is nothing in these characters which gives the viewer the incentive to root for them, then to be frank the viewer does not give two shits, or even one shit, about what happens to them. No, by then you will just be glad that the violence can now begin which means that this exercise in futility is through.

Then, you will walk out of the theater wondering whether you’ve wasted three hours or three-and-a-half of your life only to be surprised to learn that Last Knights is less than two hours long. It feels like a far longer duration movie simply because it is too boring. Some other movie that was released in 2015 might be as bad as Last Knights but one cannot imagine anything more obnoxious than it.

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