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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
Shot entirely in the outback of Iceland, it's a gallery of hauntingly beautiful locations, and director Sturla Gunnarsson skillfully uses its bleak otherworldliness to distance us from anything familiar and evoke a lost heroic age.
ridiculous
Trying to give us the true story behind the epic, the movie only reminds us of why humans write epics in the first place.
A more accurate title of this conceptually anemic if prettily mounted take on the Scandinavian epic might be Beowulf and the Vixen.
Top CriticThis film has constant action, drinking jokes, and a blood-thirsty troll.
Beowulf's reality-driven approach suffers for lack of scope and questionable poetic license.
Sturla Gunnarsson's adaptation... despite some pretty awful special-effects makeup [is] a pretty good -- and good-looking -- version of the tale.
Thus does Beowulf collide with postmodern punk sensibility.
The incredible landscapes are breathtaking and hint at how inhospitable nature can be.
The thrilling beauty of this reading of Beowulf is that it makes [the characters] feel modern... These people live in the real world, not in a fable and not in a history book.
This movie won't be to everyone's taste, but it will certainly bedevil some dreams.
...realistic, [but] Polley...is woefully miscast.
A lumbering and ludicrous mess.
Imagine the worst Deadwood episode ever, and you'll get an idea of the general tone of Beowulf & Grendel.
Unfortunately, there is... jarringly contemporary English dialogue... laced with F-bombs and humor straight out of a Monty Python movie.
We've got a surprisingly multilayered drama
A fascinating trip to the dark ages and a good story well told
Icelandic-shot version of the legendary revenge saga is visually arresting and plausibly retrofitted for modern consumption, but lacks the savage bite that might have given the sixth century-set tale real impact.
Top Critic...astonishingly dull and hopelessly irrelevant...
For the most part a successfully strange and strangely moving adventure.
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