For a film set in Roman Britain and filled to the brim with more swords, sandals, soldiers, tribes and betrayals than one can shake a toga at, The Eagle is staggeringly boring. What’s even more shocking is that director Kevin McDonald, responsible for such edgy, gripping fare as Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland, completely fails to invest the film with his usual energy and sophistication. It just sits there, completely inert, on the screen.
The film is taken from Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth. In the lead role, Channing Tatum clenches his jaw and lowers his voice to Russell Crowe levels as young centurion, Marcus Aquila. Keen to restore his father’s name after he disappeared with the Ninth Legion in the wilds north of Hadrian’s Wall 20 years earlier, Aquila teams up with a feral British slave, Esca (Jamie Bell) in an attempt to reclaim the famed Standard of the title.
The odd mixture of accents from the multi-national cast is less of a problem when compared with the film’s dramatic deficiencies. A bit of derivative, post-Gladiator cribbing is just about acceptable (Tatum praying at a mini-shrine prior to going into battle) but did the film have to follow such a predictable track?
Once north of the wall, it settles into a dull routine of landscape shot, horseback discussion, skirmish, another fog-bound discussion and then back again, before an encounter with the menacing Seal People of the far north gives it a minor lease of life.
By then though, it’s too little, too late. Tatum underwhelms in the lead role not because of his acting but because of the writing, and Bell, a much more charismatic actor, suffers the same fate.
Compared to other, superior sword and sandal flicks, The Eagle feels like it’s been tethered to the horse and dragged behind for several miles.
Rating: 4/10
