[The following review contains some mild spoilers, but frankly there's not much to spoil since the whole plot is a rehash of movies you've seen before. If you can't describe all the main points of the plot BEFORE EVEN SEEING ONE SECOND OF FILM, we'd like to know if your Amish friends have any nice quilts to sell.]
With the lead actor coming from the WWF wrestling thing, I don't know what I should have expected really, but I went to see "the Scorpion King" anyway. I suppose basically I have a weakness for Conan - which fascinated me in my youth when I discovered the allusions to the life of Temujin Genghis Khan - and I was hoping to see some Conanesque swashbuckling. However apart from muscular men striking poses with swords in front of scantily clad women, this was no Conan.
True, it throws more than one sop to Conan, with a plotline that is taken almost intact from the second half of "Conan the Barbarian" (and numerous similar movies through the ages); the formation of a remarkably similar party of adventurers; and Mathyas/Conan being wounded, left to die, and saved, in remarkably similar ways. But then, it also has plenty of sops for actual WWF fans. (Well, it even has a bit from Ulysses for those of a more classical bent.)
However Conan, at least, was fairly free of glaring anachronisms, and those anachronisms it did have were subtle enough to offend only the eye of the scholar, and even then could be excused by the fact that Conan is (arguably, possibly) set in a fictitious world at an indefinite time.
Not so Scorpion King. We know roughly where Scorpion King is set, and we know roughly when. In fact, the hero is explicitly stated to be an Akkadian [1] shortly after the fall of that empire (in 1950 BC), and much of the action is set in Gomorrah [2], which is presumably somewhere in the Levant and generally believed to have been destroyed somewhere around the same time. And the anachronisms are absolutely agonising even to one scratching to remember his high school history. Here we are in the Bronze Age, and we have steel. Not just a little bit of meteoric iron here and there, but practically every non-golden metal object is steel, and it's cheap enough to throw away. Swords are not only highly polished steel longswords, but a few are even straight bladed, cross-hilted crusader longswords, some three thousand years before their time. As if that's not enough we have telescopes some three thousand five hundred years before their time (and not just any telescope, but a variable power one), distilled spirits some three thousand two hundred years before distillation, crossbows around twenty nine centuries too early, chainmail similarly, a "scientist" (yes they use that word) busily inventing a Roman catapult only about seventeen centuries too early this time, and finally, God Forbid, gunpowder.
Yes, we are in the ancient Near East, and we have gunpowder. I kid you not. But it's supposed to be ok because we got the recipe from China. Never mind that we are some four hundred years before the first traces of civilisation in China - yes, China is old, but it isn't old enough to make this story work. We also meet some Japanese sword masters giving lessons with a shinai, a mere thousand years before the first vestiges of civilisation reached Japan and once again roughly three thousand years before katana (and presumably shinai) were invented. Oh, and finally (well, finally from what I spotted without even trying) there is nary a chariot to be seen, because everyone (apart from Mathyas on his camel) gets about on horseback - complete with stirrups (and the wagons are drawn by horses, too!). That goes nicely with the crusader longswords, I suppose.
However, it is by no means only the anachronisms that grate in this awful movie. The acting is straight out of "the A-team", and it says something that "the Rock"'s performance is actually one of the better ones. We are even treated to a bout of WWF style wrestling - the sort where men are only lightly stunned after being repeatedly struck over the head by objects hard enough to crack your skull. The characters, by and large, are poorly developed and unsympathetic:
The thief character seems to have been added simply because Conan had a roguish sidekick. But Conan's sidekick was played for comic relief; Mathyas' sidekick is just stupid, getting one interesting scene where he rescues Mathyas from a grisly death, and then ever afterward doing absolutely nothing either for the plot or for laughs. Well, there's a couple of bits that perhaps were meant to be funny, but they are pretty damn weak. Like him standing at the bottom of a shaft as others thrown down bags of gunpowder. Two are thrown at once, knocking him down. "One at a time", he whines. Guffaw. Chortle. Snigger. What a maroon.
Memnon is meant to be the evil bad guy, and Mathyas is the hero. But the moral distinction between their characters is so slight it is difficult to see why we are supposed to see any difference between them. Indeed, it seems to me there are just two incidents, without which it would be just as easy to "root" for Memnon and think the climax was a tragedy. You see, Mathyas is a king who is conquering the quarrelling neighbouring tribes. This is supposed to be the black mark against his name, even though he believes he is ultimately creating a better world by suppressing the chaos and internecine strife that has plagued the land. Mathyas, on the other hand, is an assassin, a cold blooded killer who murders for money. He's the good guy, y'see? Now I actually got halfway through the movie repeatedly thinking "Isn't 'the Rock' meant to be the good guy?" before something occurred to (very mildly) differentiate their characters: Mathyas misses a shot at his target to save a boy who helped him, and who is in trouble because of Mathyas, while Memnon casually kills a lieutenant who is undermining his authority. Oh, and Memnon also accepts the service of a patricide. That's about the limit of their moral distinction; otherwise they are both cruel men of violence, with Memnon's motivation arguably slightly nobler! Oh, and then there's the princess who wants to flee a life of luxury with Memnon to the wilderness, but why? At one point, Memnon says "you think I'm cruel, don't you?", but no explanation is given for her holding this belief. Then she meets Mathyas, who is scarcely less cruel, and jumps in the sack with him.
Next on the list of gripes are plot holes and non sequiturs. For example, at one point Mathyas is captured and many hours afterward escapes - and immediately, mere feet away, finds his camel with all his (numerous) weapons untouched and complete with a treasure he was to be paid for the assassination. Umm, how come the guards didn't take this stuff? Then there's the fighting prowess of the princess. We are given to understand that she has led a cosseted life, so it is no surprise when, with a dagger, she is barely able to nick Mathyas' arm. But only a few days later she is wielding a longsword nearly as long as herself, and effortlessly cutting down the elite personal bodyguard of the greatest swordsman on earth! When we require a deus-ex-machina to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, we blow up the foundations of the palace (conveniently accessible from the street) with the scientist's gunpowder - creating a rolling Hollywood fireball which incinerates every bad guy in its path whilst missing good guys only twenty feet from ground zero, and happily causing Memnon to fall to his death. But the next day the palace is apparently undamaged! Then there's Mathyas' wound. SOMEWHAT STRONGER SPOILER He gets a high lung shot in the back with a broadhead arrow, and quite reasonably drops like a rock (the Rock?). He should be flopping about like a gutted fish, with two or three minutes till he dies. Even if someone in 2000 BC knows enough first aid to stop that lung collapsing, without access to a major surgical hospital and heaps of antibiotics, he will be dead in a day. But - and you KNOW there's a but! - after lying on the verge of death for a few seconds, he decides it isn't so bad after all, gets up, reaches behind his back to pull out the arrow (how the hell does that work!?), and proceeds to slay his foes, etc . The next day he's up bright and early, full of smiles. No explanation, no justification, no dunking in the River Styx, no "oh, I don't have a lung on that side; born without it, and it's never bothered me!". Nope; he's just plain immortal. What a load of horse puckey. END SPOILER
A couple of miscellaneous bits: You're a king commanding vast armies, and your bride-to-be - who happens also to be instrumental in your military and political power - has just been abducted by a skilled assassin, and taken who knows where. How many guys would you send after her? Five hundred? Ten thousand? No, how about _twelve_?
Scorpion venom just isn't that toxic. For an adult, it's very painful, but not life threatening. Some very large scorpions have occasionally killed a very small child, but even that's unusual.
The Amazon warriors. For no apparent reason or explanation we suddenly get a cartload of amazons who easily slaughter the elite bodyguard once again. Maybe their marketing people told them they'd be getting a few Xena fans along.
The gunpowder seems to have been a deus-ex-machina to justify the good guys winning, since they were basically royally screwed (even if the king was dead, if you pardon the imagery), when the vastly superior opposition just surrenders and declares the outlaw bandit to be their king. Huh? Why?
Footnotes: ==========>1. Well, actually he's somewhat black - Samoan ISTR - which Akkadians weren't, but we can just gloss over that bit. And the bit about his "brother" being an Amerindian who bears him as much resemblance as chalk does to cheese. But then the Gomorran princess appears to be Chinese, so it seems to be the politically correct thing to totally disregard human phenotypes. 2. Although they do seem to flit around quite a bit with remarkable Jet Age speed, ranging from snow covered pine forests (Turkey?) to a desert much harsher than any in the Levant. (Since Mathyas rides an Arabian camel - unknown outside Arabia until the Romans started importing them for service in North Africa - and describes this desert as "home", it is presumably Arabia. Odd that an Arabian should have been comfortable shirtless in the snow... Incidentally, this desert is named "Death Valley", and it appears to me that it in fact actually _is_ Death Valley, Mojave Desert, California...)
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