UK Release Date: 23-04-2010
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Neil Marshall
Country: UK

Blink and you probably missed this head-butting Roman actioner, which is a shame. The either unaccountable or disputed disappearance of the Ninth Legion in the northern frontier of Roman Britain in the First Century AD is the premise for the latest film by Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent). Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) is the only remaining survivor after the destruction of a frontier fort in the north, and he reluctantly finds himself marching back into the Pictish maelstrom with General Virilus (Dominic West) of the legendary Ninth Legion. Virilus’s mission is to destroy the Picts and their leader Gorlacon. But the best laid schemes o' mice an' Romans gang aft agley. His forces ambushed and massacred, Virilus is taken hostage, while Quintus undergoes a harrowing struggle not only to rescue Virilus, but keep himself and the handful of remaining centurions alive behind enemy lines. In their desperate attempt to reach the safety of the Roman frontier, Quintus and Co. are pursued relentlessly by the revenge-driven pin-up Pictish scout Etain (Olga Kurylenko) leading a bunch of wode-daubed bruisers baying for Roman blood.

Any mysterious and supernatural explanations for the disappearance of the Ninth Legion are set aside in favour of a drama about a bunch of hard-arse Roman soldiers ultimately caught in the meat grinder of politics. But the intrigue is peripheral - this is an action film. Blades lodge in thick skulls with brutal and solid finality in Centurion. Marshall doesn’t make the mistake here of going all Gladiator on us: there’s no protracted sinister conversations among golden columns and decorous drapery. These Roman grunts are chased across hostile, tangled, unforgiving terrain, wrapped in coarse woollen cloth to keep off the hailstones. Given the odds against them, it is not long before they begin to succumb to ‘Romero’s Law’ and self-preservation becomes every man’s overriding concern.

Former Bond girl Kurylenko is given nothing to say, mainly because Etain’s tongue was cut out by raping and pillaging Roman soldiers, one of her many beefs with the Mediterranean tourists. Dominic West (The Wire) is suitably imposing as Virilus, while Fassbender imparts to Quintas an intelligence that just has the edge over brute force and ignorance when it comes to the business of survival. Even Imogen Poot’s woodland white witch Arianne, an outcast, plant-foraging, herb-mixing, proto-eco hotty materialising straight out of a fantasy novel, belongs here, both as a foil to snarling she-wolf Etain, and as a brief but pleasant intermezzo amid the extended roaring allegro of action. The supporting cast offer up the sort of foul-mouthed trooper chauvinism familiar to anyone who has seen Dog Soldiers. They make the Spartans in 300 look like a bunch of eunuchs.

While it is undeniable that Marshall’s action films are variations on a single theme, that theme is a strong one: motley band, impossible odds. This staying alive at the sharp end of existence lark ain’t easy. Marshall is unabashed about his cinematic influences – here, Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort and Westerns, a genre to which Hill’s film itself owes much – but much of his considerable skill as a director lies in his ability to make of them something other; to take elements of given genres and put them to the service of a punchy and pacy cinematic ride, with some distinctive British grit. As to any absence of historical accuracy in either the film’s events or its characters’ physical capabilities, appearance and attire, I for one couldn’t give a hoot. This is bloody, escapist cinema of the very highest order. Centurion may not have had a huge impact on its cinema release, but it's well worth a handful of your precious sesterces when it’s released on DVD.