Beowulf

So, I haven’t posted a movie review in a while. It’s not that I haven’t seen any movies lately, it’s just that I don’t feel that compelled to write about them. One movie that has broken this recent stint of apathy is Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf. I watched it on DVD the other night. I rented it from one of those Red Box DVD vending machines. It cost me $1.07 with tax. I made sure I returned it on time so I wouldn’t be charged another dollar.

Beowulf is a laughably terrible movie. It uses that weird animation technique that Zemeckis first introduced with his creepy Christmas movie, The Polar Express. I thought he would have improved the technique for Beowulf. I was wrong. All of the characters look like they are on the nod—heroin addicts with empty eyes. The funniest example of this is Robin Wright Penn’s character, Wealthow. She looks totally stoned. The runner-up award goes to John Malkovich’s greasy haired Unferth. Also, everyone has this really smooth, rubbery, completely unreal looking skin. When Beowulf fights Grendel, he does so naked, and we are privileged to witness one of the smoothest asses ever seen on the big screen or the little screen, in 3-D or 2-D, depending on where you may have watched this piece of refuse.

Since most of you already know the plot and I don’t feel like analyzing it, I’m pretty much done with my review. I’ll end with a rant about the rating. This ultra-violent, limb-rending, blood-splattering, head-decapitating, eye-gouging, ass-showing, nippleless breast-exposing, donkey-punching masterful work of cinematic art is rated PG-13. Way to go, MPAA. I’m not a big fan of the rating system and this movie will stand as a classic example of what is wrong with it. This is an R-rated movie that flew under the radar due to the Spielberg Exception*. Let’s get kids into the seats. The bottom dollar. I know, I know…Beowulf is an adaptation of classic literature and its animated and those are just make-believe monsters that are getting slaughtered and kids play violent video games all the time and this movie looks like a video game or a cartoon and the writing is terrible (shame on you, Neil Gaiman) and I should have seen it in 3-D at an IMAX theatre so I could have really understood the director’s true intentions even though it would have made me cross-eyed and horribly motion sick and I’m being too hard on it but fuck. This movie sucks.

*There has to be a Spielberg Exception, I’m sure of it.