‘Medieval’ (2022): Go Hard or Go Home

Directed by: Petr Jákl || Produced by: Cassian Elwes

Screenplay by: Petr Jákl || Starring: Ben Foster, Michael Caine, Til Schweiger, William Moseley, Matthew Goode, Sophie Lowe, Karel Roden, Roland Møller, Werner Daehn, Vinzenz Kiefer

Music by: Philip Klein || Cinematography: Jesper Tøffner || Edited by: Steven Rosenblum || Country: Czech Republic || Language: English

Running Time: 125 minutes

I can’t remember when or exactly how, but at some point in the recent past (my guess is the early COVID-19 to post-pandemic era, or 2020-2021), I stumbled across various articles online detailing a new European production set in the late Middle Ages (~1300-1500) that was supposedly the most expensive Czech film of all time. My memory beyond those cursory, circumstantial details remains vague save for my noting at the time that the film’s production, titled as the unimaginative Medieval (Jan Žižka, or Ben Foster’s lead character in Czech), starred notable Hollywood and United Kingdom actors such as Foster, Michael Caine, and Matthew Goode, and was also an English-language production.

Ben Foster (left) receives royal orders from Michael Caine (right) on behalf of King Wenceslas (Karel Roden, offscreen) that conflict with the former’s rules of mercenary warfare.

Fast forward several years later and well past the movie’s Fall 2022 theatrical release, and Medieval has already faded from most of the international film community’s memory if it ever made much of an impression in the first place. Critical reviews are mixed to poor, while the film flopped at the box office after grossing only ~$4.4 million worldwide on a ~$20.3 million budget. The film remained on my Hulu watchlist for some time, however, given the film’s dramatization of an interesting period in central European history after the Western Schism (1378) and just prior to the Hussite Wars (1419-1434) of late medieval Bohemia (now Czechia).

After watching it at last, my overall take on the film isn’t too different from my general impression of it from afar during its production: Medieval is a good-looking, capable historical action film about an underappreciated geohistorical subject in popular culture that takes advantage of its seasoned cast; the plot of the film is also borderline incomprehensible at times and its characters are, for the most part, flavorless. Again, nothing too shocking too see here.

Let us start with the good; Medieval looks and sounds well about its modest budget by Hollywood standards, retaining the dreary, humid, desaturated look of most of Game of Thrones‘ (2011-2019) filming locales, which mixes well with the brutal, gory hand-to-hand combat that is the film’s main selling point. The film’s starring cast, while bereft of memorable characters, have decent chemistry with one another and are convincing as medieval monarchs, warlords, and mercenaries (i.e. there are no JC Penny catalog models sticking out from rugged extras, nor any inappropriate melodramatic monologues). The film also builds steam by its third act once the attentive viewer has had enough time to decipher the screenplay’s complicated, poorly conveyed narrative; by the same token, Foster’s protagonist has beefed enough times with secondary antagonist Roland Møller (also known as “the muscle“) that the heroes’ final assault on an enemy compound has some weight to it. I would also be remiss not to mention the impressive computer generated (CG) lion that spices up the finale and whose presence is tastefully established well ahead of time, putting the cartoonish digital FX of similar animals in far more expensive films like RRR (2022) to shame.

Unless you’re a hardcore fan of either historical fiction or hack-‘n-slash action, though, Medieval doesn’t have much to offer. The behind-the-scenes political machinations that justify the bulk of the movie’s plot development often don’t translate to the melee combat we follow on the ground. Unless you’re a scholar of this particular region’s history, much of the cloak-and-daggers stuff will fly over your head because writer-director Petr Jákl can’t seem to convey that material to his viewers in a visual way. This is a dynamic at which Game of Thrones excelled along with romantic melodrama, another element with which Medieval also struggles (see Sophie Lowe’s weightless female lead). That’s a shame in the case of Medieval because its origin story of Foster’s Hussite military commander, the undefeated Žižka, has potential on paper.

Though not the greatest live-action integration of computer animation in the world, the limited creature FX of Medieval are well executed and help the movie finish on a strong note.

At the end of the day, Medieval is another low to mid-budgeted genre film and original intellectual property (IP) that had no business competing in the early 2020s theatrical market. Although blockbusters have stumbled more often than expected recently in Hollywood and specific genres like horror have always been a staple of Anglophone film industries, that doesn’t mean any novel IP now has a chance at the international box office. Theatrical success still depends, for the most part, on recognizable brands and, barring that, word of mouth, and occasional online coverage of foreign historical drama productions isn’t going to cut it from a mainstream marketing perspective. Medieval needed a baller screenplay with tight directorial execution to stand a chance, and it has only one of those two at best. That may be enough for viewers like me to enjoy the movie, but not enough for me to recommend it.

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SUMMARY & RECOMMENDATION: Medieval’s screenplay foundation is flawed at a fundamental level thanks to a confusing, borderline incoherent narrative and forgettable, personality-free characters. The high-profile Hollywood and European cast are no match for their flat dramatic dialogue and apparently weak acting-direction from judoka-turned-filmmaker Petr Jákl.

— However… Jákl and director of photography Jesper Tøffner have enough eye for visual style and must’ve hired a formidable production designer, because this movie’s sets, costumes, outdoor locations, and general ambience are great. The melee combat is brutal, bloody, and creative, particularly when it comes to a certain large feline.

—> As much as the action fan in me loved parts of Medieval, I remain, at best, ON THE FENCE with respect to its overall storytelling efficacy.

? You never thought I would favorably compare CG imagery from a cheaper Western production to that of a bigger budgeted South Asian blockbuster, now did you?