Review

Review Date: 22-August-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Valhalla Rising (2010)

Before this year, my last sight of Mads Mikkelsen was in Casino Royale, where he played James Bond's polished enemy and struck me, per my review, as "intolerably dull." This year has shown that he dirties down nicely. He exuded a sexy warrior musk in Clash of the Titans ("he does have presence," I almost gushed), and in Valhalla Rising he looks splendid as a more hardcore fighter, drenched in blood, hatchet in hand, with one eye completely scarred over. Mikkelsen does not utter a single word during the movie. His aura of grim composure speaks for itself.

As for what transpires around him, the movie's impact is less striking. The action consists of periodic violence spattering long minutes of meandering through a gloomy, semi-mythic past. Valhalla Rising casts an otherworldly spell, but the story is veiled by the same mist that at one point thwarts the characters. Nothing is clear. Mikkelsen is either a man turned to stone by bitter experience or the Norse god Odin stuck on an earthly plane where he is no longer wanted. (The one eye and a knack for telepathy suggest the latter.) In either case, he starts off in thrall to a clan that uses him like a dog, forcing him to fight for his life while spectators wager on the outcome. His captors are rightly afraid of him since in five years he has never lost a match. Given the opportunity, he throws off his chains and starts out for home with a lonely boy (Maarten Stevenson) tagging along. Where home is we never learn.

They fall in with a band of Christians heading for the Crusades. These aren't your grandly robed chivalrous types, but filthy barbarians who decide at a glance to join the mute warrior rather than try to beat him. Some crave booty and some are bullies for their religion. This seems to set up a conflict between a fierce old god who walks among men and a new god who, though reputedly gentle, inspires fevered and false devotion, but nothing comes of the contrast. If the hero despises his traveling companions it's because they are ineffectual and he is set on getting where he's going. After sailing into a figurative (or literal?) hell, the mute warrior demonstrates his inward superiority by not cracking up like the others. His concluding "sacrifice" — so designated by one of the movie's chapter titles — might also elevate him, but it makes little sense, and a viewer might not realize it's a sacrifice without being told. The hero's journey traces muzzy ways from an unknown starting point to an ambiguous end. The impression of power and the past is all that gives form to his tale.

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