10,000 BC Review

After actually sitting through the brain rotting entirity of Meet the Spartans (I really did, all 82 cocking minutes, including credits!) the words of D:Ream resounded through my head. Things, could indeed, only get better. How marginally better things could get, I'm still struggling to believe. For 10,000BC is as risible a production as you will see at the movies this year. Part Braveheart, Part 300, Part Gladiator, All Wank.

D'Leh is a woolly mammoth hunter living a few millenia ago. All is splendid in D'Lehs world, looking as he does a bit like Colin Farell with dreads, until his tribe is set upon and his girlfriend captured. This annoys him a bit so he gets some friends together to go get her back. On his way he domesticates a sabre tooth tiger, fights giant ostriches, learns agriculture and stops the Pyramids being built. Which will surely fuck up the Egyptian tourism industry in years to come.

Its about 5 minutes in when a waft of quite repugnant stench comes emminating from the screen. Forgetting for a second the perfect skinned, styled goateed, English speaking tribesmen. Forgetting the most boring voiceover ever recorded. Forgetting still that, somehow, even though we're 12,000 years in the past 'Middle Eastern looking' guys are still the baddies. What tipped me that this film was as bad as the Chinese government was that the one thing that was supposed to be good, The Special Effects, were terrible in places. Yes the mammoths look good but when you can see so obviously that all dialogue scenes are filmed in a studio, any realism is lost immediately.

As for the 'hero' he's as useless as a Breville sandwich toaster in prehistoric times. All he does is get his friends kidnapped or killed because he steadfastly won't listen to anything anyone else says. Every moment that he does succeed in doing something that isn't retarded it turns out to be a fluke or a prophecy. So while at the end of the movie he is transformed into a hero none of this is his doing. Instead we have to spend almost two hours in the company of the wettest caveman since Barney Rubble. That little bastard got the hot girl too.