Mark Reviews Movies: MEDIEVAL

Medieval, The Avenue

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 8, 2022

In one-word snippets, some opening narration describes—or, more to the point, promises—violence, tyranny, and intrigues. The story of writer/director Petr Jákl's Medieval certainly provides those elements. It simply doesn't offer much relatable or comprehensible context for them.

Despite the generic title, Jákl's movie tells a specific tale. It's about Jan Žižka, a noteworthy hero of Czech history who led religious rebels in combat against the monarch of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which declared them to be heretics and deserving of extermination. A text coda at the end of the movie details this, as well as the fact that Žižka was never defeated in battle, because that's not the story of this movie.

It's about a lesser-known (relatively speaking, of course, because it seems certain that all of the man's life is going to be little known beyond the Czech Republic) and essentially lost chapter in Žižka's life, which is certainly a choice for a filmmaker to make. If history has forgotten this period of a person's biography, that person must not have been doing much of historical note, after all.

Jákl's screenplay (based on a previously written and subsequently rejected one, which is rarely a good sign) certainly gives his version of Žižka something to do here, as he's caught up in a kidnapping plot, involving a foreign princess, and a three-way game of deception, alliances, and betrayal for the throne. It's not much, though—at least not much more than any generic hero would be tasked or forced to do. Within the context of a lengthy and convoluted fight for a crown, Žižka also seems among the less-important figures in what's ostensibly his own story.

Jan is played by Ben Foster, one of our more consistent and bolder actors who, in this role, gets to look stern and scowl and occasionally be bothered by some horror of his past or present. That's not a slight against Foster, who does hold some command as the locally legendary warrior, but it is to say that, when even an actor as talented as him can only do so much in a role, the character himself has some issues.

They year is 1402 at the start, as Jan is a mercenary leading a team in various missions in the region. His first is to save Lord Boresh (Michael Caine) from an assassination attempt in Italy. The potential culprits who ordered the killing are the wealthy Henry Rosenberg (Til Schweiger), the man who's next in line for the throne Wenceslas (Karel Roden), or ordained king's half-brother Sigismund (Matthew Goode).

In theory, the background plot, which has to do with Wenceslas trying to raise the funds for a trip to Rome to be consecrated by the Pope, is simple and straightforward, but that introductory narration certainly adds some historical complications—such as a second Pope in France—that are never quite cleared up. That leaves a lot of back-stabbing and allegiance-swapping happening between Rosenberg, Wenceslas, and Sigismund to exist in a vacuum of vague intrigue. To be fair to Jákl, his introduction did promise intrigues—just not that we'd really understand why or how most of them would be happening in this story.

The bulk of the narrative, though, belongs to Jan, who's tasked by Wenceslas, through Boresh, to abduct Katherine (Sophie Lowe), Rosenberg's fiancée, the daughter of the King of France, and a follower of the religious sect that wants to get away from multiple popes and divinely chosen kings. Some of this is politically and philosophically intriguing, but the context of Jan's change from mercenary, to tool of the king (well, one of the potential ones), and, finally, to warrior of the people broadly amounts to him realizing that everyone deserves to fight and to die "a good death" for a righteous cause.

Forget that Jákl makes the fighting and the dying here anything but "good" or "righteous." Indeed, the violence here is decidedly brutal, especially in flashes of close-ups of throats being slit, multiple moments of faces being demolished by various instruments of war, and one scene of Jan beheading one unit's leader in front of his men, just to get his cohorts to flee in terror. Early on, the sheer horror of the violence seems to be part of Jákl's point about the real cost of the games played by those wealthy and/or powerful men, but just as with the central theme, that point is reduced and simplified until it means little. Indeed, the way Jákl constantly escalates the level of violence almost becomes something of a running joke—one that reaches its last punch line when a lion is introduced, just to maul a couple of villains.

Medieval is broadly ambitious both narratively and technically (It's apparently the most expensive Czech production ever made, and the money is mostly apparent on the screen, for what that's worth). Those ambitions, though, ultimately end at the spectacle of design and bloody combat, and as for the movie's story, it ends just as the biography of its subject really seems to be getting started.

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