Medieval (now on Hulu) is a historical-fiction action-drama starring Ben Foster as Czech military war hero Jan Zizka, a general who never lost a battle, except maybe the couple of skirmishes that are depicted in this here movie. Then again, those might merely be “fights” and not “battles,” so maybe they’ve got us on a technicality? (Remember, I nitpick because I care.) So this is technically a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie, notable for being the most expensive Czech movie ever made, with a budget of $20 million, and also notable for being a loose interpretation of Zizka’s biography, since not much is known about his early life, during which he might’ve lost a skirmish or two. It’s what you call “creative license,” something that hopefully renders this movie a good movie instead of a not-good movie.
The Gist: The first image we see is of a horse in full gallop, except in slo-mo, accompanied by voiceover: “Violence,” goes the voiceover voice, then a long pause. Then, “Tyranny. Intrigue. Power.” These are the fundamentals of the political crapshow that is Europe circa 1400, although one could argue that those are the fundamentals of all political crapshows that have ever happened anywhere. This one may be unique because there are two popes. I’ll say that again: TWO POPES. As if one wasn’t more than enough already! A couple of men are fighting over their interpretation of “God’s will,” which translates to “which of them will be king.” And when there’s an argument over who will rule the Roman Empire and Bohemia and whatever other pieces of land are up for grabs, that means life on the ground where average folks dwell is a place where chaos reigns. Corpses hang from trees, blood soaks the land, the ashes of homes smolder. The only happy people are the crows, because they have so many fresh eyeballs to peck from skulls.
Among these groundfolk is Jan Zizka (Foster), who leads a band of mercenaries in the fight against the bad guys. In this world, in order to go toe-to-toe with the bad guys, even the good guys have to be sociopaths who are fine one moment and murderous killing killers the next – but at least the good guys feel bad about what they have to do to defeat the bad guys, evidenced by a scene in which Zizka kneels down and mutters, possibly to his god or whatever, “Forgive us for what we are about to do.” And what they do is grab large swords and daggers and spiky things dangling from chains on sticks, and pummel the blood and pus out of other men. Zizka’s weapon of choice is an iron mace, which, according to the images we see in this film, does not feel good when he hits you on the head with it. One wonders if he’d rather not hit people on the head with an iron mace, or if he actually likes doing it; one gets the sense that this hypertoxically masculine age makes inner moral conflicts extra hard to wrangle.
Anyway, there’s some plot here, and it involves Lord Boresh (Michael Caine) tasking Zizka with kidnapping Lady Katherine (Sophie Lowe), the fiancee of powerful lord Henry III of Rosenberg (Til Schweiger), so she may be used as a bargaining chip for King Wenceslas IV (Karl Roden) to usurp Rosenberg’s power and therefore become Roman Emperor, much to the chagrin of Sigismund (Matthew Goode), who wants even more kingly power than he already has. That means the plot tosses Katherine around hither and yon like a political hot potato while Zizka does two things: One, outsmarts larger groups of violent men with violent ambushes that allow him to engage in acts of violence against those men. And two, looks at Katherine and wonders if he likes her likes her, especially after he loses a fight and she nurses him back to health by hiding him in a cave and plucking some maggots from a dead rat and washing them in a stream and putting them on the oozing wound that used to be his eyeball. If that isn’t a situation that inspires hearts and rainbows, I don’t know what is.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Medieval is inspired by many quasi-historical battle epics before it, thus rendering it a Czech Braveheart and/or The Northman: The Boring Version.
Performance Worth Watching: Foster is an underrated actor – his work in Leave No Trace, Hell or High Water and The Messenger shows the breadth of his range. No doubt, Medieval benefits from his presence, but it ultimately doesn’t allow him to deepen Zizka, to fully open up this hold-it-all-in stoic of a character and ponder his moral compromises.
Memorable Dialogue: Katherine reviews her own movie when she says, “Have you seen this all so many times, you no longer feel anything?”
Sex and Skin: Female nudity; a brief scene of sexual violence.
Our Take: Sadly, the seed of a Two Popes conflict finds no purchase here, so our hopes of a deadly-brutal third-act Pope-off went unrealized. We’re therefore left with the Zizka character arc, which seems to imply that the tepid affection of a pure and noble woman like Katherine helped forge the man who’d eventually become a national hero. Whether there’s truth or fact to this story isn’t the point – you know, creative license and all that – but Medieval’s dramatic assertions are so blah, our investment in them is minimal. Who is this Zizka, exactly? What are his convictions beyond being a wily Robin Hood type who sides with the oppressed? There’s lots of inferences in the script about “God’s will,” but what exactly does he think about spirituality and organized religion, and their roles in 15th-century politics?
These are relevant questions about a man who would eventually lead armies on victorious crusades, but this flimsy screenplay employs convoluted plotting that positions Zizka as the guy who takes us from historical point A to historical point B without much in the way of greater implications about his character. As a Zizka origin story of sorts, the film is frustratingly thin, and handcuffs Foster – typically a more lively presence – to its grim, suffocating tone. Typically, overcomplicated plots like this sort themselves out after a while, and this one never really does, situating us alongside Zizka as he fights whoever is against him and his ideals, whatever they are, for whatever reasons.
Such unrealized thematic rigamarole urges one to believe that Medieval exists less as a thoughtful cinematic experience, more as an action film reveling in its own violent excess, Mel Gibson-style. Director Petr Jakl zooms in on the stabbings and slashings and disembowelings, the scenes of men biting off noses and lions biting off more than that (yes, lions, because why the hell not?). The brutality is rendered with realism and a sense of operatic grandeur that works on a base level, generating a thrill or three and balancing out the talky bits and the unconvincing love story. Sometimes, Jakl finds a stone groove during action sequences, and sometimes there’s too much dim lighting and slice-and-dice in the editing bay for them to be comprehensible. Such are Medieval’s modest ambitions; the film works best as a passable small-scale battle epic, but beyond that, it’s rough sledding.
Our Call: Medieval is acceptably interesting, I guess. But is mediocrity enough to warrant a recommendation? Nah. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.