'Pathfinder' is unwatchable

By Dan Moore

Published April 20, 2007

"Pathfinder" did its best to warn me. I'll give it that. One should always be leery of a movie whose tagline reads "The ultimate battle begins," yet runs below 100 minutes. (I imagine there was some desperate re-editing after the studio got a look at the finished product.) Not only that, but it's the product of a former music video director (warning two) whose debut was the remake (warning three) of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (warning four).

Nevertheless, I arrived at the theater with the last vestiges of optimism still intact. The movie is about two ancient civilizations, I thought, that don't get a lot of screen time. And there will be maces. The history buff in me hoped against hope.

Once inside the theatre, though, the movie was kind enough to remove all doubt as to its lack of merit. We begin in prehistoric America where a tribe of natives is massacred by a group of Vikings whose job involves looking fierce. Not just fierce, but exactly like the orcs from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

A young Viking boy is left to be raised by the native survivors. He grows up haunted by his past, and as luck would have it, he comes back to the village one day to find it destroyed by Vikings. What follows is basically "Home Alone," as channeled through "The Most Dangerous Game." Our hero (named Ghost, although none of the characters seem to be referred to by name in the movie) sets traps for his potential captors and then comes up from the water and stabs them through the heart. Over and over. (Presumably the scene in which he comes up from a bottle of aftershave screaming and holding his hands to his face and stabs Joe Pesci through the heart will appear on the DVD.)

"Pathfinder" isn't just bad, it's one of the most clueless efforts in recent memory. Director Marcus Nispel doesn't hold a shot longer than a few seconds, and the camera is never still. It's always panning or tracking or zooming in on some anonymous Viking or Indian. It's impossible to tell who is impaling whom. One great set piece, a fight on a cliff in which the combatants are tied together, is ruined because the sheer volume of digital snow effects renders the scene unwatchable. Another scene, in which Ghost fights some Vikings while sledding downhill on a shield, is the most ridiculous mountain chase in a movie since James Bond went down a hill on a cello case in "The Living Daylights."

Most bizarrely, the Vikings speak in their native tongue, but the natives speak English. Not just any English, but stereotypical, stilted Noble Indian English wherein the key is to speak slowly and without contractions. Ghost is constantly told to "find his own path," apparently because the characters are aware that that is the title of the movie.

I left this movie embarrassed for having seen it. If you're the kind of person who can enjoy a movie for how inept it is, knock yourself out, but you're probably best served waiting three or four weeks until it's on DVD.