The Northman: aka why do none of the reviews mention Nicole Kidman's face???

 Howdy folks, I hope you're all well and enjoying the season.

I watched the Northman yesterday, and I feel that something needs to be said. There's some nice scenery, roaming accents, and much bloody violence. The story is a verion of Amleth, which we might know better as Hamlet - a prince must get vengeance on his uncle, who killed his father and takes his mother as queen / wife. So far, so good, and from the director of the VVitch? There's no reason this shouldn't be a good movie.

I've got a lot of time for humourless, dour viking movies, but this one didn't do it for me. There's a scene where Amleth, now a man, has joined a Viking party and raids a town for slaves. In the battle, there's a guy that he fights, I watched it pretty closely, and here's how it goes: the other guy swings his sword, Amleth blocks it with his shield and then shoulder barges the guy to the ground. While he's there he kicks him in the stomach to prevent him getting up. The other guy's face is now messed up for some reason. We're to assume he's dead, though if a shoulder barge and kick messes your face up and kills you, there's a reason your town won't get much money as slaves. This is from a long single-shot scene, and they should have taken another attempt at it. It's jarring, and the person I watched it with noticed it too, despite having me to distract them.

One of the slaves is Anya Taylor-Joy, who is a Russian for some reason. From the sounds of it her accent coach must have left to fight in Ukraine. The kid who played Amleth as a kid also sounds like an American trying to do a Scottish accent, and Nicole Kidman's accent is terrible. It's really off-putting.

Speaking of which, I read a couple of reviews saying that her performance is a tour-de-force, particularly a scene where Amleth confronts her as an adult. She tells him that she and the uncle had planned the death of Amleth's father - i.e. that Amleth's entire life had been for nothing. Fine, fine, but this scene takes place in a room with a fire underlighting it, and Nicole Kidman's face is so full of botox that she looks inhuman. There are no creases on her face so the flickering fire has no effect on it. It's even worse that it's in a movie set in the early 10th century. Every time she was on screen it was offputting, and removed a lot of the potential emotional heft of the movie.

I mean, come on.

I don't know who she's kidding, she was a very pretty young woman, there's no reason she'd be ugly as a 50 year old. Certainly it would be an improvement over the 'Janice from the Muppets' look that she's got now. I don't know how it's not mentioned in every review.

It's also telling that this scene, potentially the emotional climax of the movie, takes place when there's still 50 minutes left. The final battle, which takes place in a volcano, is far less cool than you'd imagine.

Anyway, not great. This movie has made Richard Egger's movies go from must-see (after the VVitch, and to a lesser extent the Lighthouse) to someone I might watch if the reviews are good. I'm sure that will really hurt him, but jeez.