Centurion (2010)

Centurion arrives from 2010, a year in which a British action picture could still be about men running through Scottish forests and nothing else. Neil Marshall has said plainly that he was making an action thriller, and the film honors that pledge with a thoroughness that borders on the monastic. Romans march north, Picts ambush them, and the survivors spend the remainder of the runtime fleeing across heather. There is a great deal of running. It is exercise-bike cinema, as one critic of the era put it, and the bike is pointed downhill.

The cast is more cosmopolitan than the genre strictly requires. Noel Clarke and Riz Ahmed appear as legionaries, a Numidian and a cook, and the film treats their presence as unremarkable, which is the historically sensible approach for Roman auxiliary forces. Olga Kurylenko's Etain is a formidable tracker with a spear and a grievance, though she exists to be an avenging antagonist, not an argument. The Picts and Romans slaughter each other with admirable even-handedness. Nobody learns anything about society. Nobody was meant to.

Where the film does bend history, it does so for the sake of a better chase. The Ninth Legion vanishes because that is a good premise, and Agricola governs Britannia decades after his actual death because casting directors enjoy Paul Freeman. These are liberties of convenience, not of ideology. The result is a lean, bloody, faintly monotonous pursuit picture that has no interest in instructing its audience about anything at all. For the purposes of our ledger, that restraint is itself a kind of distinction. Few films of the period worked so hard to say so little.