Solomon Kane

This is probably the best film ever adapted from a Howard character, which makes it all the more surprising that it made so little impact – both in the fandom and on the world at large. Kane is very much one of Howard’s best-known creations, and yet he is, to the wider public, almost unknown. The rights for the character were bought up on 1997, but the film did not go into production until 2008 – more than a decade afterward.

I can remember hearing news about this, and even following director M. J. Bassett’s blog detailing the struggle to get the movie made and then the even greater struggle to get it released. The film was made independently, and it was unable to secure a wide distribution deal for years, so that the release came out in dribs and drabs from late 2009 to the final North American theatrical run in 2012. The strung-out release schedule and lack of marketing surely hurt the film’s ability to build momentum, and it ended up losing money and all but vanishing.

I first saw it on a bootleg DVD before the US release, and I remember being underwhelmed by it. Now you can just stream it on Netflix anytime you want, and I decided a close rewatch was in order, since I have been going through the high-profile Sword & Sorcery films and weighing them with a careful eye.

There’s a lot to like here, really. The cinematography is uniformly gorgeous, and the sets and locations look really good. Shot on location in Scotland and the Czech Republic, it makes great use of the sorts of wide, moody vistas you can only get in places like that. James Purefoy is a fantastic choice for Kane, as not only does he look great, but he can really act and gives the hero a lot of depth. He’s an accomplished rider and swordsman, and he radiates danger and handles the fight sequences with a dynamic charisma and flair.

Speaking of the fight choreography, it is actually really good – light years ahead of any of the Conan films besides maybe the first one. The violence is appropriately bloody and savage – no PG-13 nonsense here – and even the weapons look good, being both realistic and mostly accurate for the period. The costuming is good, and once Purefoy gets the whole ensemble together with the hat and the cape, he just looks like Solomon Kane is supposed to look.

The cast is really strong as well. Besides Purefoy, we have Pete Postelthwaite (in one of his last roles), Alice Krige, Max Von Sydow, and the lovely Rachel Hurd-Wood in a role that practically embodies the kind of virtuous maiden Kane was always trying to save. Jason Flemyng has a brief but memorable role as the evil sorcerer (with a fantastic look from costuming and makeup) and even a pre-Game of Thrones Rory McCann turns up in a background role.

So what’s wrong with it? Why does it incite antipathy from Howard fans and indifference from the wider world? Well, this movie had a problem, in that Solomon Kane is a cult character, and you can either stick hard to established storylines and make the cult fans happy, or you can try to make a movie that appeals to a wider audience and sell the idea of Solomon Kane to a public that doesn’t know who he is.

They went for option B, but the script is kind of weak. The dialogue is often bad, only partly saved by good performances, and after a fairly strong first act, the movie hits a real slump through the middle third, where the plot just does not seem to be moving forward. Once it finally does, things improve, and the climactic battle is solid. But when we finally reach the confrontation with the sorcerer Malachi, we start to have a problem of Too Many Elements. The evil wizard and his masked Vader make for a good final boss team, and could have worked well, but as it is, the movie rushes those confrontations to squeeze in a big, flaming demon for the final boss, and the CGI just is not up to the drill. It doesn’t look terrible, and the design is good, but the effects just look cheap. In fact, every time this movie tries to go for big effects it kind of looks silly, as the $40 million budget just could not afford the kind of stuff they tried to do.

So there’s a lot of good elements here, but the script just doesn’t come together, and has tonal issues and pacing problems that make you spend a lot of time waiting for things you know are going to happen, but the movie tries to pretend are big reveals. The script hammers down on its themes really hard, without anything in the way of subtlety, and gets kind of preachy in places as a result. One serious problem is that the movie made its metaphysical underpinnings literally true, and Kane’s quest to redeem himself from an evil life is not an inner struggle but an outer one. This removes all the maturity and nuance from his intentions. In the stories, Kane was a man trying to do good in an evil world because he was driven to by inner forces; here he is driven by an express threat that a huge, sword-wielding demon will drag his soul to hell if he does not do good. It fundamentally changes the nature of the character.

In the end, almost no one cared. Solomon Kane, the film, was probably doomed from the start by the fact that there was not a large, hungry audience waiting for it. The people who already know and love Solomon Kane as a character were always going to see it, even if it was terrible. Bassett’s job as screenwriter and director was to not just make a good movie, but to make one that would sell Kane to an audience who didn’t know him. The final movie has grit and is beautiful to look at, but it’s not tight enough and overall presents such a dark, unpleasant world that people didn’t see a reason to care. There were plans for two sequels that were never made, and this just highlights the old adage about doing a series: don’t save the good stuff for later, because you might not get to do it.