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 fter Attila the Hun has raided her village, slaughtered
her people, and made her into a slave, a young woman name N'Kara falls madly in
love with him, and vice versa. Your guess is as good as mine when they realized
they were right for each other. Maybe it was when she saw him cut the throat of
one of her villagers that made her go all weak-kneed whenever he's around. Or
maybe it's knowing that she, now the love slave of his brother, was being
"mounted more often than his horse" (as one character puts it) that
gets Attila all hot and bothered. Or perhaps it could be that the movie
"Attila the Hun" is as serious about historical accuracy as I am about
never watching another movie again for as long as I live. Which is to say, not
very likely.
It's also very doubtful (I'll even go so far as to say impossible)
that Attila and the Huns spoke with an English accent. (Every now and then, we
even get some Scottish and Irish accents!) For you see, the Huns were Asian,
which means they don't grow up to look like Gerard Butler or Steven Berkoff. In
the annals of actual history, Attila the Hun wasn't a romantic. He was a
butcher. A killer without mercy, without repentance, and his one main goal was
to rule the world. He succeeded in setting off a race war between the Asiatic
people and the White Europeans. If not for the brilliant Roman General Falvius
Aetius, there would be no such thing as Europe today.
The history lesson out of the way, Gerard Butler ("Reign
of Fire") is Attila, and Powers Boothe ("Frailty")
is Aetius. Simmone Mackinnon, soon to be seen running away from a giant CGI
snake in "Python 2",
co-stars as N'Kara, the redhead conquest who ends up suffering from a serious
case of Stockholm Syndrome. Originally created to air in the States as a 2-day,
4-hour mini-series (plus commercials) on basic cable, the version of
"Attila" being reviewed here is the 3-hour, uncut DVD version, which
has excised "the Hun" from its title. Could it be an attempt to make
the movie seem more feature-length-esque? If that were the case, then just one
look at this film would reveal its origins quickly enough. Despite being uncut,
this version of "Attila" is still quite tame, meaning swords make the sound
of slashing a throat, but you never see it.
Not surprisingly, the production value of
"Attila" is lacking. What stands for the Hun's supposed
"kingdom" is a series of about 10 huts scattered about and about 50
"subjects" running around. Actually, it's entirely possible that the
filmmakers simply kept rebuilding "villages" over the same patch of
land. After all, considering the scale of these villages, it's not like there
was a lot to keep tearing down and rebuilding. Also, does seeing about 50 guys
on horses whirling their swords over their heads and whooping it up really count
as a "horde"? I'm being overly facetious, of course. Although I'm not
kidding when I say that no amount of Appropriate Music can convince the audience
that a supposedly "major" battle is taking place when all that's
available is a few hundred men in ill-fitting uniforms running around and
playing touch-my-sword-with-yours as the Appropriate Music swells, well,
appropriately.
Taken for what it is -- a TV movie with no redeeming
historical value -- the movie is a minor diversion, although why it took 3 hours
long is a mystery. The only reason to sit through this movie at all is for
Powers Boothe, who provides vastly entertaining sequences as his character
schemes his way through the Roman hierarchy. Which means I could have done
without the Galen character, which keeps jabbering about prophecies and visions
and all that other mystical junk. It's bad enough the film is replete with
historical inaccuracies, but we have to put up with some inane mumble jumbo too?
"Attila" suffers from the same lack of resources
as another wannabe historical epic called "Dark
Prince". The ambition is there, but the money to pull it off isn't.
There are not enough days to set everything up and there are not even enough
extras to fill up the screen. When Attila brags that he's conquering countries
and kings are sending him tributes, you have to wonder where all that money is
going, since Attila still lives on a patch of land surrounded by about 5 huts
and has about 50 subjects running around. Oh sure, his hut now has two floors,
but it's still just a hut.
The problem is that while Attila's real life might have
needed 3 hours to tell, the plots they chose for this TV movie doesn't. An hour
and a half would be more than enough. Instead, we get 3 hours of very little
happening. The film itself has only two large-scale battles to give us, but
unfortunately a TV movie's version of "large-scale battles" are not,
well, very large at all. With the resources the filmmakers had at hand they
probably did the best they could. But still, you to question why they bothered
in the first place.
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