Nomad: The Warrior: Critic Reviews

The film is stilted and lame. Worse, the acting is as grim as the story is primeval.

The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.

With commendable sincerity but also an unfortunate Hollywood veneer, Nomad is a poor man's Gladiator.

Though it has a familiar inevitability, the journey is generally compelling, thanks to fierce battles, a gorgeous landscape and heartfelt performances.

While the film has impressive 18th-century trappings and vivid battle scenes, the plotting and acting are rudimentary.

Kazakhstan supposedly spent $40 million in making this martial-arts epic. That bought a laughably corny Hollywood B-movie, gorgeous scenery, Hollywood B-actors and extras who plainly weren't members of the Screen Extras Guild.

It really isn't my cup of tea.

Rent it as a suitable test for your new widescreen TV, but don't expect movie magic.

Everything would be OK if the actors didn't open their mouths.

It embraces every cliche in the epic-movie playbook, relies too heavily on stale dialogue delivered in somber tones and offers little to its actors besides the opportunity to fashion some great-looking Eurasian costumes.

Meant to be sweeping and inspirational, Nomad is instead lurching and laughable, with terrible writing, awkward acting and clueless direction.

It harks back to those sand-and-sandals epics of the 1950s and '60s, with an international cast speaking in awkwardly dubbed English.

The use of "idiot plotting" to advance the story makes this laughable when it should be poetic.

Despite the central Asian locale, the film is largely rooted in the conventions of the American westerns and good old Hollywood Biblical epics like The Ten Commandments, as well as many of their attendant cliches.

In the American-release version of the picture, the emphasis on spectacle and the paring away of all but the most essential exposition ends up having the opposite of its intended effect.

A throwback to yeteryear's epics, Kazakhstan's official entry for the Foreign-Language Oscar is an old-fashioned actioner using real locales and extras rather than CGI effects; lack of unified vision may derive from too many directors behind the camera