RON PERLMAN, WARWICK DAVIS AND BEER-SWILLING VIKINGS…HOW DID THEY SCREW THAT UP?

Prince Valiant

A Movie Review by Mighty Doom

           Prince Valiant is a rather interesting comic strip that’s been running in the newspapers for something like five hundred years now, so I suppose a shitty film adaptation was inevitable.  I had no intention of watching this movie – it was on HBO and there was nothing much else to do – and I fully expected it to be a dog, but I didn’t expect a fucking Great Dane.  Certain things make Prince Valiant, which you may remember being in theaters for about a week some five years ago, stand out from the pack, and we’ll soon get into that.

            The plot is pure nonsense.  Vikings, led by none other than Udo Kier, a very talented actor, dig up Merlin’s corpse and find a book.  Immediately afterward the body turns into a cartoon, and then turns into a map.  I was genuinely disturbed by this, and I was all the more amused when the book is taken back to Merlin’s sister, EVIL-LYN from Masters of the Universe, who thinks it would be a good idea to steal Excalibur and do whatever it is Vikings do with their pillaged goods – use it to pillage other goods, presumably.

            Meanwhile, a jousting contest is about to take place, and as near as I can tell Sir Gawain is too hung over to enter.  His squire, Valiant (of course there are many squires named Valiant, parents are known to have said “I want my son to grow up to be a squire! Let’s name him Valiant, what a squirely name!”), puts on his armor and helmet and blunders his way through the contest until it’s discovered that Excalibur has been stolen, apparently by the Scottish, but we know it was the Vikings who did it because they leave something Scottish at the scene of the crime.  King Arthur jumps to the expected conclusion and orders Excalibur recovered and the Scottish summarily crushed.  His reasoning behind this is fairly incomprehensible.  He claims that Excalibur must be recaptured because “without it, our enemies will think us powerless.” Never mind that that would turn the situation to your advantage, jackass, because they’d send an inferior force to deal with you!

            Anyway, King Arthur’s senility aside, he sends Princess Ilene and an escort of knights to do…something, probably regain Excalibur, I don’t remember.  At this point I wasn’t really paying attention.  Anyway, Valiant and Ilene somehow end up in a cave, wherein Valiant is accosted by the immortal RON PERLMAN, who wastes no time in shooting an arrow out of his chair at Valiant and then throws a woman at him.  Then he lets the two of them go, and they do some more going somewhere, and are attacked by barbarians and midgets, after which they end up in a bar where Valiant has a rematch with the knight he bested in the joust.

            They fight more barbarians then.  We know they’re barbarians because they wear spiky armor and grunt a lot, and they have beards.  Anyway, the other guy makes extensive use of the “stab someone through a canvas barrier of some sort” patented by Dolph Lundgren in The Punisher, and Valiant is thrown over a cliff by Thagnar, the Vikings’ Rammstein Enforcer, played by Thomas Kretschmann, who played Eli Damaskinos in Blade II.  After that he does what any man in his situation would do – he goes to another bar and watches some people pouring beer on Warwick Davis, apparently a time-honored sport in fake medieval England.  Having rescued Warwick and appointed him his squire, Valiant is reunited with Perlman.  WHO DA MAN? PERL DA MAN!

            The Vikings are having some trouble with Excalibur, which is stuck in the floor and refuses to come out.  Evil-Lyn is having visions, accompanied by sound clips from Starcraft.  Princess Ilene has been sent to the Viking harem, where she takes a bath with the other girls, but this movie is rated PG-13, so the scene sucks.  Joe Bob Briggs would be very disappointed.  While Prince Valiant, Ron Perlman and Warwick Davis amass an army, Thagnar kills Udo Kier and takes Excalibur from the floor, whereupon it exhibits its Mighty Morphin’ abilities and the hilt changes so it looks more, uh…evil.

            Valiant arrives at the Viking castle and fights Thagnar and Evil-Lyn amongst a variety of goofy theater-club props and fake stone sets.  Evil-Lyn uses her Magic Powder on the Princess, but she sneezes it back at her and Evil-Lyn falls into a pot of boiling pottery clay and, for some reason, explodes.  Thagnar eventually gets the upper hand and ties Valiant and Ilene up over a sort of medieval James Bond trap, a pit full of crocodiles into which the two are lowered very, very slowly.  Then, in the film’s most entertaining and ridiculous ten seconds, Ron Perlman USES A CATAPULT TO LAUNCH WARWICK DAVIS OVER THE CASTLE WALL so he can rescue Valiant.

            The finale is pretty straightforward, but it’s so utterly absurd it’s watchable.  Valiant knocks Thagnar into a moat thing, and a giant crocodile flies out of a gate and attacks Valiant.  Then there’s some more fighting, and some magic dynamite goes off, and Ilene is accidentally killed, but God brings her back to life.  Oh, and Thagnar is killed, but that was fairly inevitable to begin with.

            There’s really not much I can say about this movie in terms of criticism.  I think it would be a lot of fun after a lot of alcohol, and that’s good enough for me.  Anything that has Ron Perlman catapulting a midget, much less one of such renown as Warwick Davis, is worth watching at least once.  Prince Valiant will, once and for all, seal your hatred of those ridiculous college theatrical students who think stuffing their shirts, putting on a fake beard and howling like idiots just cries “TALENT!” I don’t know how they got the budget to make a movie.  Oh wait, they didn’t, they just got a camera.  Never mind.