IRONCLAD

This film was dropped into a limited, barely-advertised theatrical run almost at the same time it was abandoned on DVD and Blu-Ray with...  well, what's less than no fanfare?  Negative fanfare?  That's not really quite right, because it's not exactly as if people were out in the streets yelling and banging pots and pans together about how upset they were that it had been released.  Indifference!  Obscurity!  What could doom such a film?  Is it terrible?  Nope.  Its not bad.  Not bad at all.  Paul Giamatti is King John of England, that mean bastard you might remember from almost any version of Robin Hood even the one where they are animals, and he hopes to kill everybody in England that remembers he signed the Magna Carta so he can enjoy life the way it used to be.

I thought at first that Giamatti was playing King Bigface of England, because he has a seriously big face in this movie.  Is it part of the beard makeup?  Did he gain some weight in his face for this movie?  IMDB says he shot his whole part in a week so probably not.  Holy shit, only a week?  With the amount of screaming he does in this movie, his throat must his been bloody on the flight home from England.  The quietest of his lines is pitched somewhere between a lion's roar and a locomotive explosion.  His facial puffiness might be a side effect of the scenery that he devours with such abandon I thought this might have been his final film or something.  Did I dream it, or was he in The Hangover: Part II?

There is a ragtag band of rebels holed up at the strategically important Rochester Castle, and they hope to stop King John and his hilarious hired army of giant blond pagans.  This is the 13th century right?  Where did he get all these pagans?  Fuck it.  The history is mostly sound in this one, with the right people winning and our narrator telling us what happened to everybody after graduation at the end of the film, but lots of small deviations like pagans and more advanced weapons and prettier people are done for the obvious reason of keeping us entertained.

James Purefoy, Jason Flemyng, Charles Dance, Mackenzie Crook, Kate Mara and Derek Jacobi play some of the rebels I didn't really care that much about because motherfucking Brian Cox is in the house!  Brian, Baron Cox!  Bless him for appearing in this and anything else.  I love Brian Cox.  He is the namesake of the Brian Cox Rule that states 'Brian Cox should appear in films'.  He gets to bellow lines like "The French?  Piss for blood!" with such passion that it's a miracle he didn't end up as the main character in the editing room.  Even in the film's prologue, Brian Cox will steal your heart in his first appearance, crowding into frame as a defeated, bitter King John signs the Magna Carta just long enough to loudly heckle him: "Make it count!"

Later in the film, Cox and Giamatti stand across a distance and shout threats at each other.  This could have, and probably should have, been the bulk of the movie, because its so goddamn watchable that I rewound it twice just to make sure I heard all their lines over my own joyous laughter.  All the other characters seem to love Brian, Baron Cox just as much as the audience, and when he tries to cheer everyone up after a disastrous battle by farting as loudly as he can, you better believe it works like gangbusters.

The rest of the film can't reach the level of Coxian greatness that comes so easily to Brian, but it measures up just fine; much more so on the battlefield than indoors.  You can look forward to: menacing armies marching slowly through fog, gigantic trebuchets flinging boulders and people at castle walls, hot oil and fire dumped and thrown every which way, man-splitting swords used for their intended purpose, heads bashed apart like melons with dull axes, and some poor son of a bitch gets his hands and feet cut off before something even worse happens to him.  Just in case you weren't sure what type of film you're in store for, early on Giamatti takes a sobbing priest begging for mercy and cuts hit tongue out, so you will know what to expect long before the prolonged battles actually start and the rivers of blood begin flowing in earnest.