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November 30, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > Nudity does not save predictable Beowulf

Nudity does not save predictable Beowulf

By Ingrid Norbergs | For the Thresher

When Beowulf previews first popped up, the obvious certainty was that Hollywood had really run out of ideas. The same Beowulf that students skimmed in 11th grade does not really seem like movie material.

As it goes, hero kills monster. Hero kills monster’s mom — a rather progressive, if misogynistic, idea. They live happily ever after — except the monsters. The original version, however, does not include a nude, evil, dripping wet temptress fitting Angelina Jolie’s description.

In the film, the aging king Hrothgar (The Silence of the Lambs’s Anthony Hopkins) leads a riotous, booze-filled life that is shattered by the arrival of Monster Number One, also known as Grendel. Suspect priest Unferth (Being John Malkovich’s John Malkovich) asks King Hrothgar if they should pray to Jesus Christ, “the new Roman god,” to deliver them from the monster and the king replies, “The gods will do nothing for us that we will not do for ourselves. What we need is a hero.” Enter Beowulf (The Departed’s Ray Winstone).

The movie proceeds more or less according to the Old English epic, with some Hollywood twists and good-looking actors thrown in to raise the tale to modern standards of interest. Robin Wright Penn (The Princess Bride), Alison Lohman (Matchstick Men) and Angelina Jolie (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) bring the sex appeal, big names and decent acting but fail to make Beowulf anything extraordinary.

The plot is a little dull by 21st century measures. Monsters need motives. “People taste good” doesn’t work for anyone except zombies nowadays. And frankly, heroes and monsters? It has been done. Here is the secret: The hero wins.

The attempts to jazz things up would have helped if not for the fact that even the supposed twists are almost blindingly predictable.

Scenes of barbarians cavorting in a drunken melee, cracking jokes about bodily functions, disrespecting women and kicking slaves take place with little to no judgment from the filmmakers attached. The result is not only not funny but also rather upsetting.

The only interesting part of the film was the intriguingly unclear religious agenda.

The Christians, led by Unferth, take over the settlement. The film implies that the tale is not at all a fantasy, but rather a portrayal of how things were before Jesus got rid of the demons. A church burns and a character blames the “the sins of the fathers.”

Failing the plot twists, the filmmakers had one last ace up their sleeve to spice things up — boobs. For audience members not in the know, yes, Angelina Jolie’s breasts appear on screen. Not to mention Beowulf’s shapely bare behind and his just barely strategic-foreground-object-covered front. These scenes would serve to just barely redeem this movie’s entertainment value, except for the small detail that the delectable parts are computer animated.

Except for any problematic feelings prompted by appreciating the cartoon nudity, the animated format was overall a success. Some of the action scenes looked a little like a high-quality video game. But the still shots were flush with detail, each tender hair waving individually in the wind and each bead of hard-earned sweat slithering down our hero’s temple. By the end of the film the moviegoer barely notices that these are not, in fact, real people.

There have been worse movies than Beowulf. But the story lacks and the animation, while good, did not serve a battle-heavy action movie as well as real-life acting with some well-assimilated computer graphics would have. However, Grendel’s descriptions within the original Beowulf were less than verbose, so the film offers the rare opportunity of figuring out what he looks like. That is, if you are even interested.

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