Dir. Marcus Nispel
Writ. Laeta Kalogridis
Act. Karl Urban, Moon Bloodgood, Ralf Moeller

Damn it, I wanted this to be a good movie. I wasn't expecting it to be a good movie, but I was hoping to be surprised. Nope, it wasn't and I should have known better because I have only seen previews for this movie for at least a year and it finally gets an after thought release right before the busy summer season. Oh well, nothing else to do but to look forward to the summer.

Ghost, played by Karl Urban (Doom,) is an orphan Viking taken in by a Native American Indian tribe and raised by an elder and is wife. As an adult, Ghost most contend with the demons of his youth and ancestry when another Viking raiding party comes to invade the land and his entire families' village is destroyed. Ghost travels to the next village where the senior elder, the Pathfinder, helps him confront his demons as well as the Vikings, to try and save his people.

On many levels the script and, by association, the movie, were not planned out. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered and the movie makes no attempt to hide that fact. In fact the script seems to say, the hell with the facts, I have a movie to make. It creates many absurd situations and a general since of non-believability. For example, the Viking ship where Ghost is found as a child appears to have been shipwrecked and all of the Vikings as well as natives captured killed. But all of the Viking bodies are very neat on the deck, for a shipwreck, which to me means that they were killed by some other means. By what and how did it miss the child? Another problem is that I don't understand why all of the Vikings appear to be 7 feet tall and all of the natives except Urban's character appear to Umpaloompa's from the Willy Wonka movies. I would assume that the reason was to make the Vikings look that much more terrifying but in reality it was absurdly silly after awhile. Lastly, and that just means lastly of the many things I could bitch about, how is it that this Vikings could go spelunking in caves, nimble enough to chase Ghost across the country side, yet are all clumsy enough to fall of a cliff in the climatic scene? The script was not very well thought at, and in desperate need of a re-write, or ten, and makes the film mediocre at best.

I have no problems with the acting in the movie. I found that as characters, the actors were not given much to work with. The natives seemed too stupid and undisciplined which is not my interpretation of the Indian cultures that I have read about. The characters also appeared to be to be too much of the stereotyped visions we have seen in movies the last ten years or so. The natives all seem like they belong in a Terrence Malik swimming with natives movie and the Vikings all had the savage look of the 13th Warrior and King Arthur. These two stereotypes do not work will together, to much melodrama to be taken serious, and this movie is to be taken that way (as opposed to the movie 300.) The actors did the best they could but could not make the movie better which bothers me because I like Karl Urban as an action hero.

"Pathfinder" can definitely be skipped at the movie theaters and viewed on DVD. If I were to say anything positive about the movie, it would be that the first 30 minutes of action sequences were so over the top, it was kind of like watching an 80's action movie, but it becomes to slow after that and script weaknesses keeps it from being enjoyable. Pass on this movie and wait for the summer blockbusters of 2007.

Brian - the Naked Gun