British writer-director Neil Marshall appears to have peaked with his riotous 2002 debut, Dog Soldiers, a low-budget horror comedy about a squad of British Army officers under attack from man-sized wolves.

What that film lacked in budgetary muscle it made up for in gore, invention and tongue-in-cheek humour.

His subsequent pictures, The Descent and Doomsday, have remained firmly embedded in the horror genre with an increasing reliance on mindless action to prop up weak scripts.

Marshall’s slow and steady decline continues with Centurion, a survival thriller set in 117 AD Britain which was shot on the mountains of Aviemore in the dead of a Scottish winter.

Audiences will have a similarly icy response to the film.

Opening with the image of a half-naked man running, hands bound, across snow-laden hills, Marshall’s bloodthirsty B-movie barely pauses for breath for such trivial concerns as character development or historical veracity.

Slow-motion fight sequences and the flashing blades of swords are the director’s primary concern, accomplished with a miasma of digitally-rendered blood and guts.

Roman General Titus Virilus (Dominic West) leads the legendary Ninth Legion into battle against the savage Picts and their leader Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen).

During the melee, Virilus is taken hostage and most of his loyal men are slain.

Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) and a splinter group of sword-wielding warriors including Bothos (David Morrissey), Brick (Liam Cunningham), Macros (Noel Clarke), Tarak (Riz Ahmed) and Thax (JJ Feild) survive and they attempt to rescue the general.

Like the rest of the film, their hastily-conceived rescue mission is a disaster and Virilus passes the mantle to Quintus Dias, barking, ‘What’s left of the Legion is yours to command, now go!’ The Romans flee but legendary Pict tracker, Etain (Olga Kurylenko), quickly has them in her sights and she leads a small party of warriors in hot pursuit.

Sprinting over perilous terrain, Quintus Dias and his comrades cannot shake Etain.

They are gradually whittled down by the Picts, and the stragglers seek shelter with the witch Arianne (Imogen Poots) before readying themselves for the final showdown in an abandoned fort.

‘If Etain is hunting you, you may as well be dead,’ professes the witch.

‘That’s comforting,’ reply the Romans.

Centurion has the makings of an excellent comedy except everyone involved in the film takes the trek across the mountains very seriously.

Dialogue is limp, the action scenes become repetitive and the cast aren’t willing to commit themselves completely to their two-dimensional roles.

Fassbender, who was mesmerising as Bobby Sands in Hunger, doesn’t have to engage his brain at any point to play his emaciated hero.

The romantic subplot with Poots’s outcast is rushed, providing Marshall with an unabashedly-cheesy resolution to all of the macho posturing.

• Release Date: Friday 23 April 2010
• Certificate: 15
• Runtime: 97mins

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