Pathfinder: Critic Reviews

Pathfinder's moody, muddy look is courtesy of music-video director Marcus Nispel, who doesn't distinguish between people and tree trunks when it comes to emotional content.

All grunting, all goring, the witless action flick Pathfinder has little to recommend it.

Imagine a heavy metal album cover come suddenly to life and you pretty much have the measure of Pathfinder.

All cinematic creativity seems to have focused on devising the most repellent ways to maim and murder.

The story makes Conan the Barbarian seem like Dostoyevsky in its complexity.

The movie is part Apocalypto (warriors, threat of hostile takeover, violence!) and part 300 (warriors, threat of hostile takeover, violence!), but with the commercial misfortune of being neither.

After the first 1,000 or so beheadings, impalements and severed limbs, Pathfinder's slash may just induce sleep.

Dialogue is a low priority in this film, which has less plot than most video games.

Here's hoping Pathfinder II is a straight-to-video- game release.

Though you can't say Pathfinder doesn't deliver the goods, action-wise, the movie often has trouble sticking to its story between battles or involving us with its characters and its self-consciously mythic hero.

Loud and overbusy but never exciting, Pathfinder is an action film only insofar as airborne prop heads and severed appendages equal action.

Filled with foggy shots stolen from LOTR and laden with decapitations, Pathfinder is faux-period gore trash with no redeeming qualities and a high dullness factor. Find another path.

This latest bit of historical balder-dash stands in direct defiance of proven action-movie formulas, trusting its brutal concept and striking visuals to overcome a lack of star power.

The movie takes us on a journey to an ugly, contentious period in our misty, ancient past -- all the way back to four months ago, when Apocalypto came out.

The design, the limited, primitive color palette and the breathless, primal violence make Pathfinder work about as well as any movie with this director and this cast and villains who speak Norwegian was going to work.

As dim and dank as a power failure in a peepshow, Pathfinder is Apocalypto without the laughs or 300 without the muscular visuals and elevating dialogue.

There's a fan's sincere hokeyness about Pathfinder that makes the experience relatively painless, in spite of the number of people who get tortured, decapitated or dismembered.

The movie is filmed in a way that makes it seem like the camera has epilepsy and the color desaturation renders everything murky. Someone should remind director Marcus Nispel that there's a difference between making a music video and a feature film.

This one is an instant Mystery Science Theatre 3000 classic, ideal for watching on TV with loud friends.

The fault here lies in the film's dead rhythm, which never lights the sparks necessary for an action film. The plot and action progress like an eroding lakeshore, but the energy and excitement are washed away in every scene.

Without anything more to offer, the choreographed carnage gets stale very quickly.