'Pathfinder' Revels in Video-Game Violence

By Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun, Zap2It.com | April 13, 2007

Karl Urban in 'Pathfinder'

Related content

Pathfinder

Discuss this story now

Slam-bang-squash-splat -- the unrelenting rhythms of mere butchery deaden viewers early on in Pathfinder.

This tale of Vikings clashing with North American Indians is hackwork that's heavy on the hack. Although it's based on a highly regarded 1987 Norwegian movie of the same name, derived from a Lapland legend, this movie simply pumps out the gore in heavy slashes, video-game style, for testosterone-crazed teens who lap it up.

Director Marcus Nispel and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis build this Pathfinder around the simple notion that Norsemen arriving on our shores in spiked armor must have looked as monstrous to the natives as the orcs did to the hobbits.

In the prologue, an Indian mother finds a pale young boy in the belly of a boat that's become a charnel house. What killed these Vikings off? Disease? Or did they forget how to fix their ship after it foundered on rocks?

Anyhow, she shames her tribe into accepting the boy instead of turning him out to die. And in a case of nurture changing nature, he grows to be a strapping brave (Karl Urban) who looks as swarthy as any Native American.

But this protagonist won't find out who he is until he faces the demons of his past: his biological brethren, with their horrific helmets and eye shadow, and their bloodcurdling grunts conveyed in a soundscape that could have been designed by Darth Vader. (The prime demon was his warlord father, who disowned him for balking at beheading an Indian infant.)

Our hero says the Vikings carry "plunder and slaughter" wherever they go because it's "in their blood." They prove it when they return in force to ethnic-cleanse the continent. For most of the movie, Urban and Russell Means, as a wise, aging Indian tribal leader and pathfinder, and Moon Bloodgood, as his daughter, do their darndest to harass the Norsemen and direct them away from any possible sites for future massacres. Urban looks lost, and not in a path-finding way. But he probably yearned for something a little more urbane.

Borrowing a page from The Scriptwriter's Guide to Hoary Dialogue , Bloodgood teaches him that two forces war for a man's heart, love and hate, and the one that's fed more wins. It's not exactly romantic poetry, and the only things that are horny in this movie are the Vikings' helmets.

For his part, Means teaches Urban that if he's not strong enough to kill a bear, he should use the bear's strength to kill it. That lesson would carry more weight if the movie's bear attack weren't such a grizzly fizzle. Nispel times all the action to a high-speed metronome fitted with a broadsword. There's no bloody elegance or surprise in the cavalcade of guttings and decapitations. Nispel is too impatient to get to his visceral "money shots"; as a result, he turns them into cheap shots. He mixes quick cuts with slow-motion, and shoots in an ugly blue-grey and white palette that makes the movie look like stonewashed jeans.

Here's my nomination for future grindhouse double-bill from hell: Pathfinder and Apocalypto.