Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/16/07
Is it just me, or have posters,
banners and stand-ups for this movie been in theaters since the Reagan
administration? Pathfinder (as it's called on-screen; Fox's
subtitle-happy marketing department has dubbed it Pathfinder:
Legend of the Ghost Warrior in ads) has been appearing and disappearing
from the release schedule for at least a couple years now, but the runaway
success of 300 has apparently persuaded the studio
to finally let it out of its' cage. But it's not the Spartan blockbuster
that springs to mind now that I've seen it: substitute Vikings for
Mayans and Pathfinder is like a short, artless Sci-Fi Channel remake
of Apocalypto.
About a thousand years ago,
Native Americans discover a crashed Viking ship with a single survivor:
a sword-wielding child (Burkely Duffield). The tribe adopts him and
he grows up to be sword-wielding adult Ghost (Karl Urban). One day,
a new ship full of sadistic Norse Warriors arrives and slaughters the village.
Ghost is injured in the attack and taken in by yet another tribe, led by
the Pathfinder (Russell Means). He recovers and warns them to run
for it while he stays and makes a stand. And that he does, with the
help of the peculiar Blackwing (Jay Tavare) and Pathfinder's daughter Starfire
(Moon Bloodgold). But when he finds that he can't outfight the Viking
hordes, it's time to outthink them.
Befitting its' oft-delayed
status, Pathfinder is pretty awful, but it's also got a loopy, shaggy-dog
silliness that keeps it from getting dull. All you need to know about
the kind of movie we're talking about is that the Native Americans speak
English, while the Vikings are stuck with their subtitled Native tongue.
Not that I'm complaining, this isn't really the kind of movie where a person's
looking for the illusion of linguistic accuracy, but it's kinda got to
be one or the other, doesn't it? As much as the gnarly Vikings are
everything you'd expect, the various Indian tribes we meet seem to have
the plasma TV they watch Oprah on hidden in an off-screen tent.
I suspect that ideas like “If we let this child out to die in the cold,
then we'd be the real monsters” weren't tossed around much in the year
1000. Of course, I should be grateful for any dialog that doesn't
sound like it comes out of the Random Indian Generator, although I did
enjoy the way the bemused Means looks like he only says things like “He
must find his own path. He has much vengeance in his heart” for the
same ticket-buying tourists that have him speaking English.
What keeps Pathfinder
from being a complete wash-out is that it does get better as it goes.
While the first third is a total snooze, once Ghost heads for the woods
to, to paraphrase a classic Paul Reubens line, “Kill them a lot”, the middle
third gets profoundly silly, with his three-person attack force staging
an elaborate Ewok-style assault on Vikings who wander the woods alone like
campers waiting to run afoul of Jason. And then something really
crazy happens and the last third actually isn't that bad, as Ghost and
the Viking leader Gunnar (an all-in Clancy Brown) finally get to exchange
some dialog and engage in a battle of previously unseen wits.
Nispel (who directed The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre but is more famous in certain circles for losing
the End of Days directing job after issuing a massive Manifesto
dictating how his crew was to grovel before him at all times) seems to
be from the Michael Bay school of low-budget directing: cut early and often
in hopes of disguising the fact that you haven't really shown us much of
anything. That's part of the reason the action gets more interesting
as it closes in on a few characters toward the end: the only thing
worse than watching two people fight in quick, unconnected flashes of violence
is watching two anonymous people fight that way.
Urban makes a pretty good
B-movie action hero, and Brown snarls his Viking lines with great evil
conviction. Means, always a fine actor, seems to have a ball in a
role that's pretty far beneath him, but no one else is able to do much
with their wildly generic characters and dialog. Laeta Kalogridis's
screenplay is so stitched together from spare parts of other movies that
I'm tempted to credit the 1988 Foreign Language Film Oscar Nominee Ofelas
(of which Pathfinder is a North Americanized remake) with most of
the interesting plot developments, but I've never seen it to be sure.
One final note: a lot
of people seem to find my site while doing Google searches to answer questions
raised by the movies I'm reviewing, so let me address something you might
be curious about. An opening title informs us that a lot of people
wonder why the Vikings never settled our continent, and adds “This is The
Legend.” Well, I've done a little digging and I don't think you should
devote
the next year of your life to trying to track that Legend down. Not
only couldn't I find anything in my own search, but even the movie's official
site backs off far enough to call the story “Legend-Like”. Uh, huh.
Because it's such a goofy mess, Pathfinder at least manages to be
fun-like, but you've got to be the right kind of masochist (I enjoyed
a little giggle fit when one of the Vikings complained “I can't see anything!”
while marching through another fogged-up set). As a wise old English-speaking
Pathfinder once said, we must all find our own path. |
