Dog Soldiers
*
Cinema Releases - May 10, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. 105
minutes. UK. Written and directed by Neil Marsall. Starring Kevin McKidd,
Sean Pertwee, Emma Cleasby, Liam Cunningham, Thomas
Lockyer.
"Dog Soldiers" feels like being
kept awake on a camping trip by someone who attempts to tell jokes but keeps
missing all the punchlines. It's a grim, flat and boring werewolf movie that
refuses to develop an energy level -- even when the characters are screaming
at each other, breaking windows and watching their guts spill onto the ground,
we feel that something more should be happening.
Kevin McKidd and Sean Pertwee star as leaders
of a British army patrol doing manoeuvres in the Scottish highlands. They
and their men trawl through leaves, look cold and fed up, moan about missing
the England-Germany match, tell each other spooky stories. And then they
come across a Special Forces captain played by Liam Cunningham, who has been
stranded in the woods and is ranting about a beast that will be the death
of us all.
Some big hairy things with fangs appear in the
shadows, and there's a mad dash to a deserted nearby cottage, and from here
on "Dog Soldiers" follows the trusty formula of people stuck in a house trying
to defend themselves from evil outside forces. The writer and director, Neil
Marshall, attempts to bring his picture to life with shots of limbs falling
all over and heads getting splattered, but his shots of gore are disjointed
and numb; they don't build into any kind of rhythm, they just pop up now
and again, and that's it. There's no comic timing. Look at the scene in which
McKidd attempts to put Pertwee's guts back in his chest, and Pertwee keeps
drunkenly shouting, "You're my best mate!" It should be hilariously over-the-top,
but it sits on the screen naturalistically.
The performances are okay -- McKidd brings good
humour to his bland hero role, while Pertwee has fun with the grit of his
early lines without having to ham them up. But the filmmaking stinks -- it
doesn't have the gusto of "Brotherhood of the Wolf" or the courage to go
as deeply into Grand Guignol territory as "The Evil Dead". You can see this
sort of thing in any old drive-in picture about werewolves, or in the late
night Channel 4 shorts that satirise them. "Dog Soldiers" is not entertaining,
not funny and really not very lively.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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