Shari Savage

I lasted 10 minutes. When did loud, in-your-face song clips become a substitute for scoring? Not even the promise of Kevin Bacon could keep me from the sweet relief of turning it off. Rubbish.

Where to start on this dumpster fire of a film? Brilliant actor Joaquin Phoenix is stunningly miscast and the insipid script leaves him with a one-dimensional caricature of a complex historical figure, alternately swaggering, pouting and sniveling with no clues whatsoever given as a basis for his behavior. The story is all over the place and lacks cohesion, yet every gratuitously bloody battle scene is so uniformly grey and gloomy it is literally difficult to tell one army from another. And the accents: were they just plucked from a hat? Seemingly every character has a different accent. Just. So. Bad.