futurilla Review of Labyrinth

Labyrinth (2012)

A dreadful first part, but a quite watchable second part.

[4/10 · 23 December 2012]

This is a mini-series adaptation of a publisher-driven/designed 'bestseller' by Kate Mosse. The very plodding first part of this two-part TV movie adaptation certainly doesn't improve on the poorly-reviewed book. The movie does improve significantly in the second part, but anyone expecting a new Da Vinci Code or even a National Treasure is going to be in for a deeply disappointed slog. Actress Jessica Brown Findlay, and the movie's technicians and the location-scouts, obviously did their best to hold it afloat. But everything else drags the first part down. The first part's glacial pace and slapdash dialogue might not matter, if the characters and plot were at least mildly interesting. Generally they're just the movie equivalent of cartoons. The modern-era heroine (Vanessa Kirby) is especially annoying - she starts off doing utterly silly things and then spends the rest of the time wafting around looking glamorously confused. Only the medieval-era heroine (Jessica Brown Findlay) brings any sustained acting verve to the first part. The great John Hurt, aided by lashings of artful landscape cinematography, lifts the movie significantly during the second part. Findlay also performs very ably in terms of the acting range that's required from her in the final hour. The film's history/religious elements are very superficially explored, although they are quite historically and even theologically correct. But you can't help thinking that the ideas are largely there to provide a televisual licence for many bloody and gruesome scenes of torture, throat-slitting and other killings, suicides, and medieval massacres. There is some basic voice-over exposition of the more user-friendly Cathar ideas at the end - ideas remarkably similar to those permeating the movie Cloud Atlas - but these ideas lack any deep integration into the rest of the story. In the end, certain key physical items lack any explanation, and so the audience is left feeling rather duped. Overall, not a very satisfactory movie.