When Druids/Vercingétorix came out on rental a couple of years ago, I thought this is a movie worth seeing. It had Christopher Lambert ("Highlander"), not one of the greatest but good enough, in the lead, with supporting performances by the always reliable Max von Sydow ("Minority Report") and mostly good Klaus Maria Brandauer ("Out of Africa"). For some reason I never got around to rent it, until now that is... Thankfully I didn't put my money on it earlier. I wouldn't say it is as bad as its reputation, but it's not much better either. What probably looked like a french version of Braveheart, turned out to be a boring and overlong version of something else than Braveheart. The script and direction, courtesy of Jacques Dorfmann ("Shadow of the Wolf") is missing all the excitement and grandiosity of an epic tale. For example, the battle scenes are supposed to be bloody and violent, but all we get to see is some arrows flying... Instead we get a slow-moving, badly directed incoherent mess that has a script that makes pretty much no sense at all. Let's not even start about the dialogue... What's worst about it, is that it seems like even the actors knew that while filming. How else can you explain the wooden performance from Lambert and Brandauer. Max von Sydow has the charisma to play the master druid, but the lines they give him are utterly useless, nobody could do anything good with that. It's certainly not a very good movie but it's far from being worst ever (for that we have Police Academy 7, Ski Patrol and Knock Off) ** (2 out of 5)
