“There’s this giant spaceship and it crash lands on Earth and a man survives but he’s captured by Vikings and he helps the Vikings fight other Vikings and falls in love with the chief’s daughter but he accidentally brought an evil alien dragon with glowing eyes with him on his ship and it attacks all the Vikings so he goes hunting it in a huge cave and and and…”
Outlander is what you’d get if you told a 10-year-old boy to make up a story and gave him a Hollywood studio instead of a box of crayons. The film’s graphic bloody violence, decapitations and Boschian nightmares, however, means said 10-year-old won’t get to watch it at the cinema (it’s rated 15) and will have to wait till he can smuggle it out on DVD. The casting is solid, if unimaginative – James Caviezel as action man hero, Jack Huston as slightly weedier Viking warrior, John Hurt as wise old tribal chief – the script is nonsense, there’s some terrible hackneyed romance and adopt-an-orphan drivel, and the film is unnecessarily epic at 115 minutes. None of this, of course, will mean anything to the boys jumping up and down on the sofa swinging enormous swords at monstrous dragons, who will grow up remembering Outlander as one of the greatest films ever.
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