Who payed the critics

Waste of time

Don't Believe the Hype

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It's 1600. Solomon Kane (James Purefoy) leads a British privateer ship into battle in North Africa. His men are massacred by demons and he comes face to face with the Devil's Reaper. He escapes back to England. After giving away his wealth to an abbey, the monks send him away to his ultimate destiny. He heads for home despite his conflict with his father and the death of his older brother. He joins the Crowthorns (Rachel Hurd-Wood, Pete Postlethwaite, Alice Krige), a Puritan family traveling to the new world. He had renounced violence until the attack of the evil sorcerer Malachi's men.The story is a dark mix of fantasy and history. Purefoy keeps it compelling. I like Postlethwaite and the movie gets a bit muddled without him. It would have been nice to keep him and Krige with Purefoy as they go rescue their daughter. This is a fine example of a mid-level budget adventure but it's not superior. The good is that there is nothing obviously bad here.

The first 10 minutes of the film were enough to deter me from watching anymore of it. the acting by the main character was absolutely shocking, i fail to see how the storyline could possibly compensate for the acting. i think perhaps if the film makers had put more of an effort in preparing an introduction to the character at the beginning of the film it may have drawn some attention off the lack of originality and acting ability. its a shame they didn't have a better cast. a rating of 6.1 is extremely generous. this film may perhaps pander to those who are obsessed with all the 'dark' theme nonsense, other than the that, the fighting scenes were average and the production was sub-par, i don't see what else the film has going for it. would highly not recommend watching unless you have absolutely nothing else to do with your life.

Sometimes the movie business makes you shake your head and sigh. Sometimes it just really pisses you off. Watching Solomon Kane was the latter experience. As a fan of Robert E. Howard's dour, puritan adventurer, I was quite excited when I heard he was finally making it to the big screen. I mean…at least it had to be better than Kevin Sorbo as King Kull, right?Wrong.If this had been a good film but an unfaithful adaptation of Howard's work, I could've accept that. If it had hewed closely to the pistol- blasting, sword-wielding, explicitly Christian fanatic that REH created but sucked as a motion picture, I could have lived with that. Writer/director Michael J. Bassett, however, managed to screw this pooch coming and going. Whatever affection for or commitment to the source material he may have had, he let his ego run wild and decided to substitute his vision for REH's. Which would have been bad enough but then that vision turned out to be as hazy as Mr. Magoo's and as shopworn as a 53 year old crack whore.Let me start by addressing my fellow REH fans. You may be tempted to view this thing in the future. Don't. There is little to nothing of REH to be found here. This is a freakin' prequel, for pete's sake. It is set BEFORE any of the Kane stories or poems and purports to explain how Kane became the icy crusader against evil that you and I enjoyed reading about. Now, you may be thinking that means Solomon Kane is like a feature- length version of the origin story from the Schwarzenegger Conan flick. It isn't. This thing gives us a Solomon Kane who is a greedy, self- centered and somewhat cowardly bastard and is transformed by experiences into a steely, unflinching slayer of villains and monsters of all sorts. Imagine if Conan had started out as some effete, Hyborean Age accountant and turned into a barbarian thief and warrior. Who wants to see that? Bassett then compounds his arrogant error of thinking anyone would be interested in him de-and then reconstructing the creation of a writer a thousand times better than he with filmmaking skill on the level of a basset hound. Let's start with the most elementary of his mistakes. He introduces Kane as a murderer obsessed with treasurer who is told by a demon that his actions have damned him to Hell, causing Kane to flee to a monastery and be even more obsessed with saving his own soul, to the point that he begs like a little bitch when the head of the order throws him out. I don't recall Kane doing anything all that heroic for almost the first half of the film, and even then he only kills a bunch of bad guys AFTER they've slaughtered most of the Puritan family who took him in and kidnapped the family's daughter. Kane then gallops around killing possessed raiders, with no apparent plan of how this would lead him to the missing girl, and falls into alcoholic despair when told the girl has been killed. It's only when he learns she's alive that Kane rouses himself and confronts those responsible. That turns out to be Leatherface, who has somehow traveled back in time like Army of Darkness to the early 1600's in England, and this other dude who looks like he's been lifted entirely out of a REH Conan story because pre-history Cimmeria and Jolly Old England are interchangeable to a "writer" like Bassett. After defeating them and a CGI fire-demon that appears to have a slow wifi connection, Kane sets out as a redeemed soul ready for the stories REH came up with.Oh, and there's also this bit about an old friend of Kane who helps rally the people against Leatherface and the Conan sorcerer. Except he's introduced with about a half-hour to go in the movie, despite the movie starting out in Kane's past during roughly the same time this doofus was supposed to know him. Why not have the guy appear in those scenes and then return later in the story? Because if this guy hung out with Kane when he was a greedy, murdering bastard, that would make him a greedy, murdering bastard too, wouldn't it? Bassett somehow realized that would be problematic for a minor supporting character, but not that it was an even bigger problem for his main character. Forest. Trees. You know the rest.And this thing also has several flashbacks to Kane's childhood and we find out that the evildoers he's facing now are connected to what happened in those flashbacks. I guess because being horrible and vicious killers who pillage the countryside and massacre scores of innocents isn't bad enough. They have to have a backstory with the hero, as though that's going to be what finally gets the audience's attention.This is a prequel for a character that, sadly, few people have ever heard of. It takes nearly half its runtime to get that character into his classic outfit. Then by its end, he's abandoned that look and is garbed like some generic D'Artagnan-wannabe.On the plus side, the sword fights are okay.If you see this on a nearby screen, look away and go find the original stories by REH. You'll be glad you did.

This was a good one. It's worth seeing if your local video store has it. One of the attributes of the character is pretty much standard. A guy that has seen too much violence in his life and decides to make a break from it and take the path of righteousness. He's not a complex character. You'll not spend the entire film trying to figure out why he does what he does. Sibling rivalry does enter into the movie ( you'll just have to watch it). Some of the characters in the movie have the ," he's just a has been. Don't put your faith in him". While other characters in the movie have the ,"Solomon.We're all counting on you to deliver us from evil",opinion. You kinda feel bad for the guy. He makes an honest attempt at redemption,but it don't quite pan out. It also has the "save the damsel in distress" option added on here. Fairly typical,but like I said ," the mans trying to redeem himself".