Centurion (Neil Marshall, 2010)

The sword-and-sandal revival trudges on like a tired legionnaire in the wake of the success of Gladiator back in 2000, with TV series mostly going for backstabbing soap operas with forced modern political parallels while movies centre on hack-and-slash action. Centurion managed to nab the story of the Ninth Roman Legion annihilated by native Britons before the following year's The Eagle, but both are rather unsatisfactory exercises that understretch a fine cast, this one squandering the likes of Michael Fassbender, David Morrissey and Ulrich Thomsen. You can see both the budgetary and local appeal of setting a Roman epic in Britain, and the landscapes are impressively utilised, but the battles are a poor cousin of their Gladiator counterparts, inviting unwelcome comparison through using a similar multiple-frame rate filming technique of the plentiful gore on show, while the story and characterisations themselves have little meat on them.

4/10