Their loss, according to William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who wrote, “Shot entirely in the outback of Iceland, it’s a gallery of hauntingly beautiful locations, and director Sturla Gunnarsson skillfully uses its bleak otherworldliness to distance us from anything familiar and evoke a lost heroic age.” Despite its impressive scenery and unimpeachable source material, most critics were unmoved by Beowulf & Grendel, and after scoring with Canadian filmgoers, it sputtered out quickly in U.S. He lives to regret this decision after the orphan grows up to be Grendel (Ingvar Sigurdsson), who returns to terrorize the kingdom and can only be stopped by the fearless Beowulf (Butler). Two years before Angelina Jolie exerted a disconcerting level of mo-cap sexitude in 2007’s more succinctly titled Beowulf, Gerard Butler played the titular warrior in director Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf & Grendel, a beautifully filmed retelling of the ancient saga about the generations-spanning grudge that erupts after a Danish king (Stellan Skarsgård) slays a troublesome creature that’s been pestering his lands, only to let its offspring go free. For Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, however, that was precisely the point - as she argued in her review, “The season could do with more grinning, spinning, un-self-important, happy-to-be-B throwback movies like this one.” Unfortunately, while Fire proved a medium-sized box office hit, most critics felt it squandered all the potential of its premise on a movie that sacrificed compelling story in favor of eye-popping visual effects. After all, it isn’t every day filmgoers get to watch British construction workers accidentally open an underground cave full of dragons, triggering 10 years of panic, death, and mayhem - or watch an axe-wielding McConaughey leap into the mouth of one of the filthy beasts. The only film to combine the acting might of Gerard Butler, Matthew McConaughey, and Christian Bale with the special-effects majesty of fire-breathing dragons and the giddy thrill of witnessing a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, 2002’s Reign of Fire had a lot going for it.
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