Reviewed by Michael Edwards
Stars James Caviezel, Sophia Myles, Jack Huston, John Hurt, Ron Perlman,
Aiden Devine, Cliff Saunders, Patrick Stevenson | Written by Dirk Blackman & Howard McCain
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £24.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 115 minutes | Directed by Howard McCain
James "Jesus" Caviezel stars as a man from a technological race in a galaxy far far away and, despite the light years of difference between his homeworld and Earth, he looks just like an Earthling. I know this because his character, Kainan, has the misfortune of crash landing on our home planet so that I can closely compare them. But to spice things up a bit, he doesn't land in the present day when we might be able to help him somehow: he lands in Viking times. Worse still, he's accidentally brought a big, angry, luminous dragon with him.
The backstory is that Kainan's race found a planet they liked, but it had some nasty carnivorous dragons on it. To solve the problem of wanting to inhabit a lush planet densely populated with predators, they set the whole thing on fire. But some of the dragons survived, and as several colonist ships departed it was discovered that one of these MASSIVE DRAGONS had somehow managed to secretly stow away on the ship. Which I suppose explains the crash at least. Spinning off from this tragic backstory is the unnecessary emotional tale of Kainan missing his family and feeling guilty for not protecting them. I call it a tale, but actually it is expressed solely through a small Viking child who looks wistfully at Kainan now and then and wordessly conveys that he looks up to him as a father-like figure. The result is that we know when the child will appear, why he is there, and why he doesn't need to be there. This makes his role both sickening and pointless, the two worst attributes a character can have.
The obligatory love interest Freya (yes, the Nordic goddess - the names don't get any better) is a lazy archetype that must have been devised by writers Blackman and McCain (who also directed) at the tail end of a drunken afternoon in a particularly uninspiring bar. She crops up as a Xena: Warrior Princess type of character, acting like a free spirit and kicking the backsides of the men that get in her way. The trouble is, she changes character more frequently than Rory Bremner and one minute will be swordfighting, and the next cooking for the menfolk, another minute she'll be imposing herself on a select warrior task force, and the next minute squealing and running away like a typical damsel in distress. It's a distracting, annoying and infinitely avoidable mistake.
As if this wasn't enough superfluous bilge crammed into the plot of a supposedly simple action flick, there is a war between the Viking tribe with whom Kainan eventually allies and a local rabble led by hammer-wielding Gunnar (Ron Perlman). The tribes have had a long rivalry which recently came to a head after Gunnar sacked the village of his rivals and killed the father of Wulfric (the Scrappy-Doo of the movie who follows Kainan around itching for a fight). This inter-village rivalry comes to as unsatisfying a conclusion as the rest of the film. By this point I'm sure you're wondering, "What about the action?" Well that's what I wondered too. The dragon-type beast was a carbon copy of the monster from The Host, except with added neon strip lights which served the sole purpose of brightening the image so much that graphic designers didn't have to worry about including expensive and time-consuming details. The action set-pieces weren't too bad when the finally happened, but they were nothing to write home about and certainly weren't worth the pain of sitting through the tiresome, conflicted and generally poorly devised plots that surround them.
The bottom line is that Outlander is a mindless action film that can only be stomached when drunk, or if you completely suspend your disbelief and just watch for outrageously stupid combat scenes. But frankly, I'd suggest you spend your hard-earned cash on something better than this.
EXTRAS *** An audio commentary; deleted scenes; animatics and visual effects tests; a making-of featurette; atwork galleries; and the theatrical trailer.