Valhalla Rising: Critic Reviews

When it comes to crazy, violent, semidelirious, testosterone-laden, proto-Viking tales about a mute visionary one-eyed warrior who breaks skulls, Valhalla Rising is pretty great.

Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the Pusher films and Bronson), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable.

I'm not sure there's much going on behind this blank, brutish surface, but it's undeniably distinctive and packs a certain primitive punch.

If only the pieces added up to an experience that sticks and that didn't finally succumb to a shrug of entropy.

A movie as maddeningly ponderous and self-important as its black-metal title.

Mesmerizing ... A trippy nightmare of savage poetry burning slow across bleak and otherworldly landscapes.

It's a trip into a primordial world and primeval sensibilities, and if you're looking to shake off the mall-movie blahs, there are few better places to look.

It's a chilly, often slow, uncompromisingly harsh film, but Refn's images will sear your retinas.

Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot.

To dismiss Refn's repetitive approach as tedious would miss the poetic undulations of his elegantly minimalist exercise.

Lots of movies about the Middle Ages can do the mud and blood -- though we sure see a lot of both here -- but in this movie it's like Refn has ripped you out of time and dropped you there.

You sometimes wish Refn's gift for Ridley Scott-level mayhem had won the battle over his much iffier Werner Herzog leanings.

Filled with brutality.

A mad meditation on the primeval nature of man, faith and survival, this is Apocalypse Then, and then some.

Directed in moody and portentous strokes by Nicolas Winding Refn, this is the most abstract Viking movie you'll ever see...

Less Braveheart than Aguirre, The Wrath of God, this evocative Viking tone poem contemplates the convergence between violence and religion.

A Nordic odyssey straight down to Jerusalem

I appreciate Refn for pushing against conventions of rhythm, photography, subject, color, and form, and I don't mind that Valhalla Rising lacks a story so much as I question its reliance on enigmatic hints of some grand, over-arching abstraction.

It's like a gorgeous graphic novel with a protagonist and story that vanish utterly from the mind as soon as the last page is turned.

Aguirre as conceptualized by Jim Jarmusch and executed by Terrence Malick.

This is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with the despondency jacked to 11.

For an ugly, brutish, uberviolent Viking epic, Valhalla Rising is gorgeous, each frame a haunting work of art. Refn's style, though, is unsustainable at feature length.

In the mood for a slower-than-molasses viking movie inspired by spaghetti westerns and samurai swordplay epics. Have we got the flick for YOU!

so formless and arbitrary in meaning that it all borders on pretentiousness