Furious

 

This is a 2017 Russian-produced film based on on the historical Siege of Ryazan and events surrounding it, though we don’t have a huge amount of hard information about the battle, so people can – and have – felt free to invent a lot of heroic detail.  The main plot centers around the warrior Evpaty Kolovrat and his efforts to at first defend the town, and afterward to avenge it.

Set during the mongol invasion of Russia in the 13th century, this is a quasi-historical epic that doesn’t let accuracy get too much in the way of the action.  At the beginning our hero, Evpaty, is just a child, and he sees his lord and retainers cut down and captured by a mongol ambush.  He is wounded in the head and left unconscious.  We then cut ahead to 13 years later, when he has grown to belong to the prince’s guard and suffers from a strange type of amnesia, where whenever he sleeps he wakes up in a kind of berserk rage, thinking he is back on that day.

The movie takes a good bit of time to show us his daily life before it gets wrecked, and I think that was a good choice.  We see his wife and his children and his friends, we see Ryazan before it is destroyed, and so later there is more emotional weight to the death and ruin in the town.  Also, the sets, both indoor and outdoor, are outstanding, and combined with the first-rate costuming we see an imagined slice of Slavic life from the middle ages, which is not something often seen in the West.

Once the action gets going, it is good stuff.  The weapons and armor are all pretty good, even if the mongol costuming can get a little outlandish.  Accurate or not, the costumes look fantastic.  The fight scenes have good choreography and imaginative cinematography, so they are exciting and visceral.  Unknown actor Aleksandr Choi is magnetic as Batu Khan, and he probably gives the best performance in the whole movie, really giving the villain of the piece a lot more depth than you would expect.

This was shot in Russia, and so the filmmakers made great use of the snowy, frozen vistas you can probably only find there.  There are also a good number of CG backgrounds and digital flyovers, and while these look like CG, they are not terrible, and they sell the kind of oversaturated, hyper-real world of the movie.  The plucky bunch of misfits, led by their vengeful warrior with his two swords and his traumatic brain injury, poison the mongols, set their camp on fire, and terrorize them with various masks and costumes, all while fighting off numerous attempts to kill them.  I do like that the mongols are played by actual Asians, and that they are not made into caricatures or racist demons.

By the midway point it becomes pretty obvious that this movie is basically trying to create a Russian-themed version of 300, right down to the hopeless but dramatic last stand and even directly referencing some specific shots.  Choi’s Batu Khan is definitely in the same ballpark as Rodrigo Santoro’s Xerxes, though not so cartoonishly depicted.  And as with 300, the filmmakers are kind of stuck with the fact that Batu Khan won this war – he flattened the Russian principalities and the Golden Horde ruled Russia for 250 years.  It can be hard to make an uplifting ending out of something like that, so they mostly don’t try, rather embracing that tragic aspect of Russian folklore and history.

I will note that the dubbing on this is absolutely unbearable, and if you are going to watch it at all, switch over to Russian with subtitles, as otherwise you will be groaning too hard to pay attention to anything but the bad, bad voice-overs.  In the original language, however, this film is transformed.  Some stunning scenery, great cinematography, good fight and stunt work combined with stellar sets and costumes that really evoke a different world.  If this movie had thrown in Baba Yaga or something, then it would definitely be a Sword & Sorcery movie, as it is, this sits comfortably on the shelf beside Howard stories like “Swords of Black Cathay” or “Shadow of the Vulture”.  You can watch this on Prime and it is definitely worth a look.