With its achingly archetypal cold open — which unfolds in North Africa in the 1600s, and describes its setting as “a time of witchcraft and sorcery, when no one stood against evil” — writer-director Michael Bassett’s adaptation of the pulpy old Marvel Comics serial Solomon Kane seems poised for another rather dunderheaded dive into brawny action adventure swashbuckling. Amidst the backdrop of a bunch of grimy cretins, a hero with impossibly white teeth emerges, dispensing brutal justice. Somewhat improbably, however, this movie soon settles down into a fine if square-jawed groove, delivering rousing, no-nonsense adventure of a sort which should generally please fans of Conan the Barbarian, The Legend of Zorro and other throwback, morally black-and-white entertainment.



James Purefoy stars as the title character, a warring English captain whose bloodthirstiness initially knows no bounds. After attacking a mysterious nearby castle with an eye on plundering its riches, Kane finds his soul cursed by the Devil’s Reaper (Ian Whyte). Renouncing violence and devoting himself to a life of peace and purity, Kane finds his oath of spirituality and nonviolence put to the test when, after having been aided by a Puritan family headed up by William Crowthorn (Pete Postlethwaite), he is unable to stop their slaughter and the kidnapping of their daughter, Meredith (Rachel Hurd-Wood), by a band of followers of sorcerer Malachi (Jason Flemyng). Strapping back on his cutlass, pistols and rapier, Kane aims for absolution through a trail of deserved dead. Think of it as a historical (and less hysterical) sort of spin on Ghost Rider, by way of Robin Hood or Zorro.

As first envisaged by pulp author Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian), the character of Solomon Kane was a somber Puritan (which, yes, meant the inclusion of a funny hat) who wandered the Earth striking out against evil and injustice. Howard’s stories, from the 1930s, were mostly published in Weird Tales, and the character was then resurrected in the 1970s and ’80s by Marvel Comics, and later Dark Horse Comics. The massively delayed arrival of Solomon Kane on Stateside shores (a French/Czech/British co-production, Bassett’s movie saw an international release almost three years ago) speaks to a relative lack of stature in the comic book/pop cultural canon, but perhaps owing to this fact the film largely escapes the gravitational pull of source material adherence that weighs down so many projects of this ilk.

Solomon Kane feels old-fashioned, yes, but its streamlined narrative rather quickly becomes something of a virtue. The script is straightforward in its presentation of obstacles — this isn’t a movie of much complication — but Purefoy’s dark brooding and emoting are a nice match for the material, and the rest of the cast is all on the same page, tonally. If the film’s mediocre budget hampers the execution and delivery of a couple more broadly imagined action set pieces, writer-director Bassett otherwise nicely choreographs the movie’s hand-to-hand combat sequences, while Dan Laustsen’s cinematography and a superlative production design package mesh nicely with composer Klaus Badelt’s stirring offerings. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Radius/Weinstein Company, R, 104 minutes)