Drama. R. 2 hours. At the Westminster Promenade.
Cynically conjured as a kind of medieval “300,” “Ironclad” is an utterly joyless exercise in blood and dirt. It’s set amid the post-Magna Carta tumult of 1215 England, where King John (Paul Giamatti) is on a murderous rampage, out for vengeance on those who signed the famous charter.
King John is attempting to reassert control over his country, which has moved to limit his power. In southeast England, a band of rebels endeavors to stop him at Rochester, where a gray monolith of a castle presides. Here the film gathers its characters, and here it stops.
Baron Albany (Brian Cox) is among the barons who have countered the cruel king by forcing him to sign the Magna Carta. With King John backed by Danish mercenaries, the barons, aided by the Knights Templar (the Catholic order of Crusade-fighting knights), opt to confront him before he gets to London.
Albany collects a band of hardened warriors for the fight. Chief among them is the Templar Thomas Marshall (James Purefoy, who played Mark Antony in “Rome”), whose bloodlust has been much dimmed by the Crusades.
Inside the castle is the aging Reginald de Cornhill (Derek Jacobi). His young, frustrated wife, Lady Isabel (Kate Mara), provides one of the more forced intrusions of sexuality you’ll ever see in a film that is 99.8 percent men and mud and 0.2 percent women.
In the ensuing fight, there is much blood-spilling. There is horse-eating and live pig-burning. There is beheading, behanding, befooting and even betonguing.
Director Jonathan English, in his third feature film, following the likes of “Minotaur,” naturally uses a lot of hand-held camerawork in monochrome shades to highlight the ugliness of the affair.
With blond hair and a barbarian headband, Giamatti appears something like the less-handsome medieval brother of Bjorn Borg. The most appealing draw of “Ironclad” is to see the fine actor in full tyrant flight.
