An awful title and even worse marketing probably prevented Ironclad from ever having a chance at the box office. I'm not sure if it's done any better in the video market but this thing is not at all bad. It's sort of like Braveheart's less attractive, less intelligent cousin. If Mel Gibson's classic is Marilyn Monroe, this film is Jenny McCarthy or Shannon Tweed. Sure, in a perfect world you'd rather have Marilyn but who's going to turn their nose up at those alternatives if you're in the mood for a blonde beauty? There are brutal combat and fine performances here, though on a much smaller scale, and the fiction is close enough to what actually happened to validate its existence. There's a little too much make believe competing with real history, however, and it divides a narrative that needed to be unified.
When England's King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 by his rebellious aristocracy and officially establish the idea that there were limits to king's power, that may have been the birthing place of liberty and democracy in the West. Yet, King John was a hateful, miserable father and sought to strangle such new life in the crib before it could grow. Magna Carta was not the end of the conflict, as the English of the day and most history-deficient Americans today likely thought. After the signing, his enemies relented and John was able to reorder his forces and launch a new campaign to restore his divine right to rule. Ironclad plays fast and loose with the details of all that, having King John (Paul Giamatti) recruit an army of Danish mercenaries with a promise the Catholic Church will leave their homeland alone and Baron Albany (Brian Cox) gather a medieval Magnificent 6 to thwart John's plans by defending a vital castle until French allies arrive to depose the revengeful monarch.
Now, there was a castle siege and the French did get involved, but that's about all this motion picture gets right. It's close enough, though, for cinema. But unlike Braveheart, which stuck to the basic story of William Wallace and fictionalized to make it work as a movie, Ironclad devotes equal time to an entirely made up subplot involving a Templar Knight named Marshal (James Purefoy) and his forbidden love for another baron's young wife (Kate Mara). Braveheart reimagined Wallace as an action hero. This film simply makes one up, gives him his own personal story and then inserts him into this page out of English history. King John being real and Marshal not prevents anything from working quite as well as it should.
Let me give you an example. The whole deal with Marshal and the baron's wife is about how a Templar's vows forbid him from consorting with women. Yet, Marshal stands in rebellion against his rightful liege and in defiance of his Pope, violating the established order of his world. Why would someone like that blanch at breaking yet one more taboo? These filmmakers are trying to enact two diametrically opposed conflicts with the same character and then never connect or fuse them together. The stuff with Marshal's love life has nothing to do with the struggle against King John and a character built to carry one is ill suited to sustain the other.
It's as if they weren't confident or didn't know how to make the history into an entertaining motion picture, so they just came up with some stuff up to fill out the script instead of finding more in the truth that they could embellish. Imagine if Brian Cox had been William Wallace, Mel Gibson a fabricated lieutenant and Braveheart had been evenly split between the two. That is Ironclad.
Of course, being not as good as Braveheart is nothing to be ashamed of. The twin tales of this movie are both fairly well told and there's plenty of gore and bodies hacked apart. Albany's band of rebels is entertaining, Kate Mara is pretty sexy and Giamatti amps up the volume to crystallize the reality of monarchical entitlement and the sovereign as the center of social order. This may be as powerful a portrayal of how kings thought and felt as Robert Shaw as Henry VIII from A Man for All Seasons. Purefoy also smolders manfully and swings a mean sword.
I liked Ironclad. Not enough to overlook its flaws, but enough to forgive them. More people should watch this film.
When England's King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 by his rebellious aristocracy and officially establish the idea that there were limits to king's power, that may have been the birthing place of liberty and democracy in the West. Yet, King John was a hateful, miserable father and sought to strangle such new life in the crib before it could grow. Magna Carta was not the end of the conflict, as the English of the day and most history-deficient Americans today likely thought. After the signing, his enemies relented and John was able to reorder his forces and launch a new campaign to restore his divine right to rule. Ironclad plays fast and loose with the details of all that, having King John (Paul Giamatti) recruit an army of Danish mercenaries with a promise the Catholic Church will leave their homeland alone and Baron Albany (Brian Cox) gather a medieval Magnificent 6 to thwart John's plans by defending a vital castle until French allies arrive to depose the revengeful monarch.
Now, there was a castle siege and the French did get involved, but that's about all this motion picture gets right. It's close enough, though, for cinema. But unlike Braveheart, which stuck to the basic story of William Wallace and fictionalized to make it work as a movie, Ironclad devotes equal time to an entirely made up subplot involving a Templar Knight named Marshal (James Purefoy) and his forbidden love for another baron's young wife (Kate Mara). Braveheart reimagined Wallace as an action hero. This film simply makes one up, gives him his own personal story and then inserts him into this page out of English history. King John being real and Marshal not prevents anything from working quite as well as it should.
Let me give you an example. The whole deal with Marshal and the baron's wife is about how a Templar's vows forbid him from consorting with women. Yet, Marshal stands in rebellion against his rightful liege and in defiance of his Pope, violating the established order of his world. Why would someone like that blanch at breaking yet one more taboo? These filmmakers are trying to enact two diametrically opposed conflicts with the same character and then never connect or fuse them together. The stuff with Marshal's love life has nothing to do with the struggle against King John and a character built to carry one is ill suited to sustain the other.
It's as if they weren't confident or didn't know how to make the history into an entertaining motion picture, so they just came up with some stuff up to fill out the script instead of finding more in the truth that they could embellish. Imagine if Brian Cox had been William Wallace, Mel Gibson a fabricated lieutenant and Braveheart had been evenly split between the two. That is Ironclad.
Of course, being not as good as Braveheart is nothing to be ashamed of. The twin tales of this movie are both fairly well told and there's plenty of gore and bodies hacked apart. Albany's band of rebels is entertaining, Kate Mara is pretty sexy and Giamatti amps up the volume to crystallize the reality of monarchical entitlement and the sovereign as the center of social order. This may be as powerful a portrayal of how kings thought and felt as Robert Shaw as Henry VIII from A Man for All Seasons. Purefoy also smolders manfully and swings a mean sword.
I liked Ironclad. Not enough to overlook its flaws, but enough to forgive them. More people should watch this film.