Barbarian Rise of The Warrior

Title: Barbarian Rise of The Warrior (15)

Year: 2017

Running Time: 85 minutes

Director: Brent Ryan Green

Cast: Serinda Swan (Zera), William Moseley (Aysel), William Levy (Warrior)

Notes: Also known as The Veil

Rating: 1

Thoughts:   In a war-ravaged land, rival factions live in fear of annihilation. A warrior is left for dead and is saved by one tribe who believe he is destined to wage won final battle.

It starts well enough, the actors initially quite good,has and the lead full of moody angst. Some of the scenery is then very nice.

The opening scenes are classic enough - boy trained by father, boy becomes man, man steals a Princess, man gets wounded and left for dead. But some of what follows goes a bit weird.

The group he meets does very well in this bleak world in cream and light clothes, then employs some sort of strange cowl to subdue him. It risks drifting into The Silent Flute surreal territory as he has some visions.

It quickly begins to appear the cast have lost pages from the script as the story chops in the strangest of ways. The characters also do illogical things and there are real leaps in the increasingly surreal story, not helped by flashbacks and views of the massive moon that caused this world to be so bleak.

Suddenly the warrior is then training the beige brigade who are so ridiculously weak it's incredible they have made it this far. More moon shots, more surreal images. At least their training looks real and they manage to progress.

Sadly the acting then seems to take a nose dive, not helped by a simplistic script. Although the odd interruptions continue, the story then plods on in a predictable and pedestrian way.

Of course it's spiced up with nonsense (where does Aysel get all his men? Why do they bury one of their own by pushing him into the river five feet from their village? Why is the moon almost the same size as the earth and what are the two little moons?) and by the end I didn't really care who was doing what, or what happened to any of them.

The end scenes are obvious and efforts to shoot them with moody light are poor. As I sat wondering where the warrior's massive scar had gone, as he is "executed" by an unfair trial of combat (which of course he wins), the whole thing had become laughable.

Then there's a decent twist but its arrival means that most of what has gone before makes even less sense. And neither does much of what follows. The final ending is baffling.