Red Sonja

Although executed as a feature film, director MJ Bassett and screenwriter Tasha Huo's take on Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's Red Sonja plays like a couple of episodes of mini-series television stapled together. A midpoint break, in which Matilda Lutz's horse-girl turned gladiator strikes a status quo altering blow against a slave master, played by a gleeful Robert Sheehan, feels oddly conclusive, as if the film had suddenly come to an end fifty minutes sooner than expected. This conceptual or structural oddness crops up elsewhere in the film too. Rhona Mitra's Petra, an old hand within the film's arena setting (a position that reflects the actress's familiarity with the action-fantasy genre) is very quickly organised away from the mentor role she seems primed to fulfil. A move that, if anything, underlines the human wastefulness that really should be associated with something as terrible, but reflexively deployed in sword and sandal films, as big screen bloodsport. Elsewhere, an injury suffered by Sonja - before she's had a chance to vanquish her foes - registers as grievous and alarming, rather than simply the kind of wound that forestalls climax. This note perhaps sharpened by Lutz's presence, an actress who, in Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, was subjected to all manner of grisly and sustained abrasion. In comparison to its Brigitte Nielsen starring predecessor, this Red Sonja suffers and thrives in opposite ways then. The production looks distinctly underfunded, especially when compared to the cut-rate opulence provided by Danilo Donati in the mid-1980s but, while Nielsen was eclipsed by her Austrian co-star, this red-headed barbarian is only ever upstaged by infrequent appearances from an extremely well-trained stallion named Vihur.