BOUDICA: QUEEN OF WAR - Mark Reviews Movies

Boudica: Queen of War, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 26, 2023

Boudica, who led a revolt against the Roman Empire in the 1st century, is a figure of both history and, as with people whose deeds live on well past their own lives, legend. Writer/director Jesse Johnson's Boudica: Queen of War focuses primarily on the notion of the warrior queen as a legend, tapping into Celtic mythology, elements of the supernatural, and bloody battles in which legions of Roman soldiers are slaughtered with such quick precision that it doesn't seem to take much of a toll on our protagonist.

That style of storytelling makes a good amount of sense here. What, after all, do we really know about this person, the times in which she lived, and the battles she waged against a dying empire? There are contemporaneous accounts, to be sure (The movie opens with the statement that the facts of Boudica's tale come from the Roman historian Tacitus), but how much can we really believe from histories written almost two millennia ago, from a limited perspective, and without any notable input from the other side of a war such as this one?

At a certain point, only the legend matters, and that seems to be Johnson's approach to this story. The idea is sound, but the execution, unfortunately, leaves quite a bit to be desired.

For here is Boudica (Olga Kurylenko), the wife of a king in Roman occupied Britannia. She and husband Prasutagus (Clive Standen) live peaceful, humble lives as benevolent rulers of the Iceni tribe, but such things cannot last in these times.

The broader setup to Boudica's story here gets at the most obvious shortcoming of Johnson's movie. We're quickly introduced to Emperor Nero (Harry Kirton) in Rome, whose maternal issues compel him to decree that no woman in any part of the empire may hold any position of power in any station of society.

The dialogue is straight to the point, as if Nero and the general to whom he makes this decree are aware that they're doling out exposition for a story about to unfold elsewhere. There's no sense of who Nero is, beyond being a young and foppish sort with unexamined mother issues, just as there's little context to an opening scene depicting the grisly massacre of a tribe of unarmed Druid men, women, and children.

On one hand, the villainy of Nero and the brutality of that mass murder are all that's required for this story, which only sees these as the impetus of Boudica's rise from a kind-hearted wife, mother, and regent to a painted-face warrior with a seemingly magical sword. On the other hand, it's not as if Boudica and her army of various British tribes are provided much more generosity in terms of characterization. The plot is in such a rush to cover the full extent of Boudica's rise to power and he rebellion against Rome that it often feels as if this story is happening to these characters, instead of them making it happen.

Hence, we get more melodrama than history or, for that matter, drama. Prasutagus is killed by Roman soldiers while traveling, leaving Boudica and her two daughters to contend with the emperor's decree against women in power. She's publicly flogged, left for dead, and saved by a trio of warriors who previously saw something of an old goddess of war in her eyes. Boudica trains for battle, recovers a bronze sword left to her by her barbarian father, and, with some early pushback from tribal leader Wolfgar (Peter Franzén) set aside without any question, becomes the leader of a rebellion.

The screenplay here takes several shortcuts, most of them involving magic (The sword whistles whenever Boudica holds it, floats to her hand on a couple of occasions, and re-assembles after Wolfgar breaks it over his knee) and the fate of the two children (It's initially presented as a predictable twist in the making). That's because it's very much in a hurry to get to a string of battles.

They're blood-soaked-and-spraying fights, and just as Johnson (along with cinematographer Jonathan Hall) has an eye for turning the gloomy skies and overgrown landscapes of the on-location English countryside into a place out of myth, the filmmaker gives these battles a sense of being simultaneously grounded and over-the-top. Throats are sliced, and various sections of the body, including groins, are stabbed. Blood erupts from close-ups of particular blows, but without any real sense of strategy to the several fights that unfold here, the bloody affairs become repetitive.

There's simply too little bolstering the bloodshed, except for the broad strokes of Boudica's evolution and the history through which she lived, as well as Kurylenko's ferociously dedicated performance as the warrior queen. It's easy enough to believe her as a kind woman who's wronged into becoming the potential downfall of a might empire, but Boudica: Queen of War shortchanges too much of its own potential to be convincing either as legend or, especially, history.

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