I can’t decide whether it’s that Paul Giamatti goes looking for bad movies to act in or if bad movies just follow him. Seems like a really nice guy, but he plays the same person in the same way in every one of his films like a spastic, bewildered, and broken record player. It has been on rare occasions that I’ve gotten to say something positive about him in recent memory, but his acting is not only the strongest performance in Ironclad but the best thing to come out of the movie, period. Good for him. Bad for us.
Miserable as medieval times, Ironclad is an absurd, tasteless slaughter fest that goes on for way too long. Each individual aspect of this movie seems to hand off the responsibility for making it interesting to another. Every attempt to shock fails, sometimes to help us laugh at its ridiculousness, but mostly just to fail.
Whether Ironclad is historically accurate or not, I don’t care. Set in thirteenth century England, King John (Giamatti) has just signed the Magna Carta, the historical bill that granted human rights to all English freemen, against his will. He’s still kind of sour about it when he decides to exact revenge upon his people and take back his kingdom. Because he’s hell-bent on treating every single person like dirt. It’s nothing personal. He’s just the bad guy of the movie.
Thing is, a bunch of average joes have taken over the castle that the king wants, including Thomas (James Purefoy), a knight who’s taken a vow of silence, and Baron William d’Aubigny (Brian Cox). It’s an act of defiance. Lady Isabel, someone who occupies the castle before its capture and joins the gang, is played by Kate Mara, but up until budget cuts late into production, Megan Fox was signed for the role. It’s a shame. I’d much rather see a sort of hilarious rendition of a historical Transformers reboot than a depressing flop.
From there, the ruthless king sends wave after wave of soldiers to remove the men and women from his castle. The violence in this movie, of which there is a lot, is heavy, cumbersome, and non-heroic. The choreography is all messy, but we can’t really find another place in the film to pay attention to. “Hit them… hard,” Purefoy’s character says to a young knight in training before charging to face the next flock of imperial forces. In three words, this line summarizes the script and the acting quite nicely.
Close to zero build-up is dedicated to understanding the already impersonal characters, and instead, Ironclad mostly throws away the space in between battles for mindless banter, underdeveloped love stories, and… setting up for the next battle. And for that reason, we don’t really care about what goes on in the film, which happens to be very little.
Do we need to see someone’s tongue get cut off in graphic detail? Do we need to see a character, having just gotten his limbs hacked off by the king’s minions, literally get catapulted into the castle wall? I don’t know, maybe if it were done to remotely effective impact. For now, it’s just gross. I really did forget that Ironclad is supposed to be fact-based. It’s Braveheart except without any of the structure or plot, and it’s the kind of exclusion that can’t help the movie recover past the first wretched twenty minutes.
I’d hate to blame the dreadfulness of Ironclad on one, simple error, but when these filmmakers choose for the plot to center not on the offensive but the defensive, they make it very difficult for themselves to move the story anywhere. And they don’t end up succeeding, either. For nearly all of the movie, we feel like we’re just watching a reenactment of the dark ages on loop. A painful loop it is, both for the body count and for the people in the audience.
