Andrew and Nicole Lynch

I could only stand to watch 30 minutes of this movie. The historical accuracies are nonexistent. The acting is horrible. Accents are all over the place. And why, in the opening sequence, do they have narration accompanied with sporadic captions of the exact words the narrator is saying. Really poor editing there. I had high hopes when I saw Ben Foster and Michael Caine, but they both play the exact same characters that you see in every other movie they're in. Foster plays a bleeding heart pretty boy and Caine an all knowing old man. I've seen that too many times from each of them already. I can get past the cheesiness. Here's what I can't get past: In the opening battle, several soldiers in full chain mail get pushed into a river. At first I thought "That's a cool detail. Those guys are doomed"....but then Jan and his guys jump into the water after them and have a full on underwater sword fight. That is pointless. It was common for people back then to be poor swimmers. Between a potential lack of swimming skill and being weighed down by armor was a death sentence in and of itself. On top of that, even though the men seem to fall into a rushing river, once the underwater fighting starts there appears to be zero current. There is a scene when one of Jan's men says "It's bad luck to kidnap women". Women were massively mistreated in the medieval times. Maybe the director was trying to paint a picture of these men being honorable....but throughout the first 30 minutes of the movie the same men are blatantly dishonorable several times. I don't know what the point of that was. There is also a point where the crossbowman is supposedly covering the kidnapping plot from a balcony. In the shot you can clearly see the bolt of the crossbow being released, but a bolt is not sent down range. In the same scene you can see Jan wielding a clip point knife with a serrated spine...basically the John Rambo Bowie knife. A knife style that did not exist for centuries. When Jan comes across his brother's homestead and finds it raided, he says "search the houses"....which are all completely engulfed in smoke. Not fire for some reason. It looks like they just through a couple high end smoke bombs in the buildings...but regardless, why the hell would a medieval soldier go into a house full of thick smoke with any success of anything. The nail in the coffin for me was when Jan finds his nephew impaled on a pylon through the lower abdomen and propped up. Somehow the kid is still completely upright. At first I thought he had been hanged based on how stiff his torso was...but no. He is impaled through the pelvis, but is still totally capable of holding himself up. Not only that, but Jan decided to put the kid out of his misery, not by stabbing him in the heart or slitting his throat...but by stabbing him repeatedly in liver. As if that would do anything at all towards a swift and merciful death. I wish I could say there was a saving grace, but writing this review has been a better use of my time than what I just saw. Absolutely terrible.