Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell's master-slave relationship is the conflict in Kevin Macdonald's swords-and-sandals film The Eagle.
The Eagle
Grade: D-
Director: Kevin Macdonald (State of Play)
Writer: Jeremy Brock (co-writer of The Last King of Scotland)
Starring: Channing Tatum as Marcus Aquila, Jamie Bell as Esca, Donal Sutherland as Uncle Aquila and Mark Strong as Guern
Last year, a film was released called Centurion. Directed by horror master Neil Marshall, the film chronicled the demise of the Ninth Legion of the Roman army in Caledonia in ancient Briton. While being a very poorly done film, Michael Fassbender was great and the action was exciting enough.
This year, The Eagle tells the story of a man and his slave who go to find the legion or any remains of them. While not an official sequel, The Eagle is a film with similar poor filmmaking techniques yet fails to entertain with either its script or its actors or its action.
Tatum plays Marcus Flavius Aquilla, a Roman centurion whose father was the leader of the lost ninth Roman legion, symbolized by a gold eagle on a carried standard. In recovery after being seriously injured defending a fort he recently took command of, Marcus saves a slave from death in the gladiatorial ring. The slave, named Esca (Bell), is purchased for Marcus by his uncle (Sutherland). Inspired by Roman Senators who don’t believe the Eagle can be returned and that his father’s failure has doomed Marcus to eternal shame, the centurion and his slave, from two different cultures and classes, take off towards Briton to find the Eagle, which has rumored to have been seen in that northern area.
It is hard to imagine that a film based on historical legend, featuring talented(ish) young actors and a good director like Macdonald could be so dreadful. The problems begin in the script, a script that deserves a Razzie. Everything that scriptwriter Brock and Macdonald made these poor guys say make me wonder how this movie even got made in the first place. I mean, I know that it’s early February and its a swords-and-sandals epic. Those usually do alright, right? On Saturday and Friday, The Eagle made approximately $8.58 million. That sounds decent, doesn’t it? Well, when the leading box-office draw of the week, the Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston comedy Just Go With It, made $31 million in the same time span, you have to wonder.
Maybe it was the timing, maybe it was the poor script, maybe it was the subpar acting. I’ve now seen four movies with Channing Tatum in them, and if I did like them it was not because of him. Jamie Bell won a BAFTA for his titlular role in Billy Elliot and was outstanding in his last film, Edward Zwick’s Defiance (a great film with Daniel Craig and Liev Schrieber set during World War II in Poland). He was maybe the best part of The Eagle, but that’s not saying a whole lot. As I sit here, I’m still trying to figure out if the acting was bad because the actors did a poor job or what the script made them say was horrific.
Regardless, I would recommend seeing something OTHER than The Eagle if you go to the movies. Even if you like action movies. The action scenes in the film were maybe two or three minutes long each time and very anti-climactic.
Down to its core, The Eagle has a tough time deciding exactly what it is. It goes back and forth between being a morality tale about the equality of all men and all cultures and being an action movie with a “touching” father-son storyline. That indecision contributed to the poor script in making The Eagle one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
zach horner 