Kirpianuscus
a character. with a coherent story who reflects his transformation. fragments of a form of Middle Age - social aspects, people, sufferance. a vulnerable hero. fantasy. and fight scenes who are parts not axis for film. for the fans of genre or for simple viewer, Solomon Kane is different by many other films from the same genre of the last decade. because the story is not a pretext for the statue of the lead character. because the black and white are mixed in inspired manner to give a fantasy precise dose of realism. because the historical references - the Dutch costume of Solomon Kane , first - are good points for a seductive story about a mission and about noble duty. so, an interesting film.
AMar_rom
We are in England somewhere in the 1610's. In the film Solomon Kane is seen initially to fight in a naval battle being captain in the English navy. Years later we find him settled in a monastery seeking desperately a quite life in the presence of God. After the urge of the local chaplain he is convinced to pay a visit to his old household and meet his father and brother. The English countryside, however, is not a safe place. Villages are ravaged by local bandits who kill and enslave at will. It is clear that Kane tries to avoid any confrontation. During the trip he befriends a family of travelers who aim to reach the local port and take a ship to the New World (America). The movie continues recounting the events till his arrival back at his ancestral home.Solomon Kane was a character in a number of stories written by Robert E. Howard the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Kane was a Puritan, a man driven by a strong religious belief in the power of Good and the necessity to serve justice in a corrupt world. Kane fought in his youth under Sir Francis Drake and then disillusioned perhaps from the violence led a solitary life as a drifter in continental Europe and Africa. The film was a pleasant surprise for me. Kane is depicted as a troubled man with a strong urge to serve justice with a religious fervor. His Puritan upbringing coupled with his military past make him a very interesting character. A very good film that made me want to read some of the Kane stories of Robert Howard.
fedor8
From the moment Solomon lays his eyes on gorgeous Hurd-Wood it is so painfully predictable that she will be his damsel-in-distress for the duration, hence her kidnapping is a foreseeable affair that does the plot no favours. Worse yet, Solomon is so gullible (which makes no sense considering the life he'd once lead) that he falls for a lie one of the demon's bums tells him about her being dead. Kane stupidly believes him – with no skepticism – and then falls into depression; this was a dumb move on the part of the writer.The other major flaw is the casting of the wizard. Jason Flemyng is so BADLY miscast that his very appearance signals the movie's big let-down moment. So FLEMYNG (with a Y) is supposed to be the macabre, Satanic wizard everyone is terrified of? Really? Whoever cast this guy as a demon is a moron and has no clue about film-making.James Purefoy sounds like David Wenham and looks like Thomas Jane. When it turned out he was neither of them, it was somewhat confusing.
MBunge
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.
