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08/29/06
Beowulf & Grendel (2005)
48
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:33
Fresh:16
Rotten:17
Average Rating:5.4/10
Consensus: Despite the impressive Icelandic scenery, Beowulf And Grendel fails to find its footing in the transition from epic tale to the big screen.
Runtime: 1 hr 43 mins
Genre: Action/Adventure
Synopsis: Out of allegiance to the King Hrothgar, the much respected Lord of the Danes, Beowulf leads a troop of warriors across the sea to rid a village of the marauding monster. The monster, Grendel, is... [More]
Starring: Stellan Skarsgaard, Gerard Butler, Sarah Polley
Director: Sturla Gunnarsson
Reviews for Beowulf & Grendel
...realistic, [but] Polley...is woefully miscast.
07/27/06
Beowulf's reality-driven approach suffers for lack of scope and questionable poetic license.
07/28/06
Thus does Beowulf collide with postmodern punk sensibility.
07/05/06
A semi-mythic period piece, Beowulf & Grendel offers sublime scenery that's breathtaking and bone-chilling.
07/14/06
Top Critic[You can] feel the filmmakers yearning to have Beowulf and Grendel go all Rambo on each other. Instead, they keep pulling back for more Old English angst, as if they’re torn between commerce and winning the approval of their high school English teacher.
07/27/06
...astonishingly dull and hopelessly irrelevant...
10/02/05
Sturla Gunnarsson... took a look at the eighth-century epic poem Beowulf and decided he could cut it down to size. And he has, for better and worse.
07/07/06
We've got a surprisingly multilayered drama
07/08/06
Sturla Gunnarsson's film ultimately lacks the grandeur and wit necessary to make the legend fully come alive.
07/11/06
Top CriticFor the most part a successfully strange and strangely moving adventure.
03/10/06
Driven by what could only be called mad Icelandic energy, Gunnarsson's Beowulf & Grendel is by turns stark, ludicrous and fascinating, with the odd dumb joke and anachronistic wisecracks leavening the earnestness.
03/10/06
ridiculous
10/07/06
Sturla Gunnarsson's adaptation... despite some pretty awful special-effects makeup [is] a pretty good -- and good-looking -- version of the tale.
07/07/06
Gunnarsson has made a film that would make the real Beowulf and Grendel, if they ever really existed, quite proud.
08/24/06
A lumbering and ludicrous mess.
03/10/06
A muscular, ardently naturalistic retelling of the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon saga.
07/12/06
Unfortunately, there is... jarringly contemporary English dialogue... laced with F-bombs and humor straight out of a Monty Python movie.
07/07/06
The incredible landscapes are breathtaking and hint at how inhospitable nature can be.
03/10/06
A more accurate title of this conceptually anemic if prettily mounted take on the Scandinavian epic might be Beowulf and the Vixen.
07/06/06
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