Even Genghis Khan Can’t Conquer Dull Production
By MAL VINCENT
IF YOU’VE ALWAYS thought of Genghis Khan as a ferocious, cruel and barbaric warrior, “Mongol” sets out to change your mind. Here, he’s a lad who wants, and deserves, revenge.
Will a movie about the young Adolf Hitler be next? Or perhaps Atilla the Hun should get his turn. In any case, Genghis (if we can be so bold as to address him informally) is more the victim than the aggressor. This German-Russian-Mongolian production spends most of its time trying to prove that Genghis Khan would, indeed, have been justified in any heinous practices he undertook in later life. He had a lot to avenge.
His father, a powerful but benevolent khan, is poisoned and his family’s possessions stolen by his own tribesmen. He is enslaved not once, but twice, as his mortal enemy spends a good deal of screen time hissing and threatening to kill him – slowly. When villains act like this, we know it’s a stall and this hero will always survive.
Tedmudjin, the lad who will become a ruler, has a rough time of it. He’s held captive with a wooden block around his neck. He falls through ice and, somehow, escapes – off camera. In fact, the film has an irritating habit of having its hero escape numerous life threats out of the view of the audience. The scene is cut and, in the next scene, we see that he has escaped from the ice. He takes an arrow in the back. Next thing you know, he’s better. A cop out. And it’s never explained how he raised his armies or where he learned military strategy.
Director Sergei Bodrov depends to a surprising extent upon close- ups and talking heads. You’d never expect to see a movie about Genghis Khan that is this tame. Khan has been played by no less than Orson Welles and John Wayne in Hollywood films that are only a little more ludicrous than this one – and a good deal more action- packed.
Japanese star Tadanobu Asano seems a bit mature to be playing the young Khan, but he lends an intense air that at least suggests that he, if no one else, is taking this biography seriously. He returns to find the bride he had chosen at age 6. Amazingly, she has waited for him. Their commitment to each other makes for a powerful love story, but we have to fill in the gaps ourself.
Even the battle scenes here are stodgy. Bodrov seems to have staged merely a free-for-all in which everyone attacks everyone. The only really big battle is the finale. It looks as if it were computer-created, even though there are claims that real armies were used. In the long shots, the armies don’t move. In the close-ups everyone moves but with no discernible battle purpose.
At its best, the film suggests that family is the bedrock of all sacrifice and war. It’s too simplistic to be trusted as historically accurate. The landscapes, however, from mountains to deserts, are spectacular and by far the film’s best asset.
There is little hint that this man will become one of the great rulers of the Mongol Dynasty and one of the great destructive forces in world history. All that, presumably, will come later in what is projected as a trilogy. Can destroying much of the civilized world be quite this dull?
Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com
MOVIE REVIEW
“mongol”
Cast Tadanobu Asano, Honglei Sun, Khulan Chuluun
Director Sergei Bodrov
Screenplay Sergei Bodrov and Arif Aliyev
Music Tuomas Kantelinen
MPAA rating R (battle scene of obviously fake blood and a brief sexual scene)
Mal’s rating
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Originally published by The Virginian-Pilot.
(c) 2008 Virginian – Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.