Pathfinder (2007) Reviewed By Anubis Cast & Crew credits Overlooked in the face of much cooler testosterone flicks like 300, Pathfinder stars Karl Urban of Doom and "isn’t he that country music douche bag married to Nicole Kidman?" fame, and Clancy Brown, the Kurgan in Highlander, Rawhide in Buckaroo Banzai, Hadley in The Shawshank Redemption, Harry Bordon in Pet Sematary 2, the voice of Mr. Krabs on “Spongebob Squarepants”… sorry, trying to focus on things better than this movie… A Native American prophecy of the "People of the Dawn" tribe says that a white stallion will herald a fast and violent change to their way of life. Little did they know that that change would come in big wooden ships from Norway, wearing helmets, swinging battle axes and talking like the Swedish Chef from “The Muppet Show”. When a Viking ship lands on the shores of North America six centuries before a guy named Columbus would bring forth rape, disease, and imperialism to the land, the glorified offspring of barbarians and pirates killed all manner of native and took others as slaves. When one of their youngsters opts out of slaughtering a baby, he's whipped and left behind to fend for himself. Thanks to that white horse prophecy though, he's found by a native woman and brought to her village to live as one of them, given the name of Ghost. 15 years later he grows up to be Karl Urban (doing his best Constantine Maroulis impression) and gets involved in the typical "outsider flirts with a native girl, thus pissing off the alpha native and leading to a high school machismo feud" crap. Being a movie not content with a single movie cliché though, it turns out that the "People of the Dawn" will soon be needing a new Pathfinder (we have a title...) to replace their aging one in all the duties of, uhm, finding paths and such. Before he can be in the running though, Ghost has to conquer the demons of his past... a statement that will of course become much more literal than figurative by the time we're watching the end credits. Of course, the Vikings return (having domesticated horses no doubt taken during their last visit) and raze G-Money's village while he's off hunting or something in his leather chaps and loincloth combo. When he comes back and stupidly pushes his way into the middle of a group of the big guys hassling his chief, he gets pushed around himself before cutting out one dude's eyeball, grabbing a sword and shield, and running off into the hills to find the rest of his tribe and save their people from being forced to learn new vocab words like "fiord". Will our hero get the girl? Faster than you can say "'80s teen comedy". Can buckskins and sharpened sticks hope to stop armor and steel? Shit, if a village of furry midgets with the same can take down a battalion of the galaxy's most feared storm troopers wielding high tech war machines, I'd hazard a guess that just about anything's possible... except for Karl Urban learning how to act. The movie looks amazing, you gotta give it that much. The forest setting is beautiful and dark and amazing to look at, whether in the throws of Winter snow or the warm sun and rains of Spring. The violence is graphic and plentiful, so much so that it’s the sole reason for the movie’s ‘R’ rating. Not a boob or f-bomb in sight, but there are plenty of decapitations, mutilations, brain chopping and the aforementioned eyeball hacking! There’s even a bear attack for the kids! You stoners can all rest easy too, because no Native American movie would be complete without a few hits off the peace pipe. You also can’t give props to the movie without mentioning their willingness to portray the Norwegians as the village burning, woman pillaging invaders that popular culture likes to ignore in favor of glamorizing them as fun loving, beer swilling, Thor worshipping, Aryans adventurers with braided beards. There were no “Yay, verily!” or “By Odin’s Beard!” going on here. No Asterix, no The Lost Vikings, no Erik the Viking, none of that cartoony playful crap: just violent, conquering brutes. But here’s where the good stuff ends and the bad stuff stops in for an unwelcome visit… First of all, Ghost’s would-be girlfriend Starfire is played by a lovely lady named Moon Bloodgood. Sounds like an American Indian name, right? Wrong. I have no fucking explanation for Miss Bloodgood’s name, but her heritage reads like this: 30% Korean, 30% Irish and 30% Dutch… what the fuck!? And what of the rest of our wacky wigwam bunch? Well, actually, it checks out that the majority of them are indeed of Native American decent, so good for them... But what’s up Hollywood? Are there really no good American Indian actresses in the world? Did you really have to perpetuate the old Tinsel Town stereotype of casting an Asian person to play the lead in your “Injun” movie?! Speaking of which, Karl Urban doesn't look Norwegian in the least. In this movie he looks like an out of place trailer park grease monkey or like Marc Dasoscos: a man trapped between cultures. Also, the Viking death squads apparently waited until North American winter before trying to invade, so they could take advantage of the wicked sledding season, as noted in one scene where Ghost pulls a Madmartigan and toboggans down a hill on his shield while the big guys pursue on their big death sleds that they seemingly pull from nowhere and have apparently been dragging through the hills and forests with them this entire time… While we’re on the bad guys, why are the Vikings subtitled, but we're to expect that the Indians speak English?! I’m going to do the risky “ass out of you and me” thing and just assume that it’s because neither Urban nor Bloodgood were willing to learn how to speak their lines in the proper dialect and leave it. I’d also like to address the absolute waste of Clancy Brown. The man is know for his big menacing visage and the venom with which he delivers his lines. The man looks and sounds like he could break you in half just by staring at you hard enough. So what’s done with him here? He spends the entire movie behind a giant beard, covered by a big iron helmet, and speaking Norwegian or Vikingese or whatever the Hell it is he’s being forces to speak while Karl Urban is allowed to run around sucking up everybody’s oxygen and spouting a language that wouldn’t be heaped upon these shores for another six or seven hundred years, and killing guys bigger, stronger and more adept with weaponry than himself by the dozens. Beyond everything else, the biggest problem with the movie is the pacing. In the movie the Native Americans refer to the Vikings as "the Dragon People". Well, the Vikings must've been behind the making of the movie too because that's just what it does: drag on. Sorry for the Richard Roeper style shithead joke kids, but I thought everything was just about over at one point, only to check the counter to find that there was still 40 minutes to go… What once seemed like a well transitioned piece of action violence quickly became a labor of tolerance. What it all boils down to is this: if you put one part Conan the Barbarian, one part First Blood, one part Last of the Mohicans, and one flagon of mead into a blender together, ran it on “puree” for 12 seconds and let the concoction congeal and fester for 100 minutes, you'd have Pathfinder: an ultraviolent action movie with almost no story that runs about 35 minutes longer than it needs to. The Moral of the Story: There are two wolves constantly fighting in a man's heart: love and hate. But sometimes, such as in my case, those wolves forget about fighting and have freaky wolf sex and birth a baby wolf of indifference. I call him Bitey.