“Beowulf” (Paramount Pictures)
Better Than the Poem
“Beowulf” is another movie by Robert Zemeckis shot in that strange animation way that causes humans to have dead eyes and botoxed skin. They also all look plastic and move in a strange loping manner. C’mon, if you are going to have talent like Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie involved in a movie why not just make it live action Instead you get these waxy characters who look like the actors speaking for them but they are not lifelike.
In the film Hrothgar (Hopkins) is the king of a Scandinavian kingdom in the first century AD. His bride is Wealthow (Robin Penn Wright), a woman much younger than her rapidly aging husband. Hrothgar is leading a full fledged party of drinking and riotous behavior. It ends badly when a monster named Grendel (Crispin Glover) breaks through the door and starts killing people.
A couple of days later a boat arrives near the castle of Hrothgar and a man who calls himself Beowulf (Ray Winstone) announces he has come to kill the monster. He does do battle with the beast and also encounters the beast’s mother (Jolie). This all leads to the second half of the film when an older Beowulf battles a dragon.
All of this is interesting enough in its plastic way but it isn’t as good as a regularly photographed movie. The animation serves as a distraction rather than an enhancement. For all the technical magic that makes the characters move, speak and act; the animators just can’t put the living spark in the eyes. That kid in “The Sixth Sense” saw dead people; the audience for “Beowulf” sees dead people’s eyes.
For an animated feature there is a good bit of nudity. Beowulf strips off all his clothes before he does battle with Grendel. Then when the monster’s mother rises from her watery lair she is naked too.
Winstone has the right masculine voice for the heroic Beowulf, and Jolie is all slinky purrs as the beast’s mother. Hopkins slurs his words as the drunken Hrothgar and Brendan Gleeson is noble sounding as Beowulf’s right hand man.
The film is rated PG-13 for nudity, profanity and violence.
The novelty of the animation lasts about ten minutes and then starts to get old. After that it is up to the story itself to keep you interested and it does to a degree. But in the end this is a saga that loses its punch. Its better than that long, long poem we all read in high school but the film version was expected to be much more.
I scored “Beowulf” a poetic 5 out of 10.
