Posted April 3, 2012 6:48 pm ○ Show Tags
Dark Relic
Director: Lorenzo Sena
Cast: James Frain, Samuel West, Clemency Burton-Hill and Tom Basden
Distributor: Koch Media
Release date: 9th April 2012
Review
Dark Relic; Light FluffI sat down to watch the screener of Dark Relic having never heard of it – something that actually happens less and less in this internet age. So with no concept of what Dark Relic might be about my mind got excited with possibilities. The ‘Dark’ part could refer to a theme a la Se7en, or a lack of light, a la, uh, Se7en. Would the ‘Relic’ part refer to an antique of some sort? Or perhaps Keith Richards? I had no way of knowing. My immediate, gut instinct was that this would be a supernatural film with a historical setting… perhaps even featuring some sort of dark relic! As is usual for the most dominant part of my anatomy, my gut was right to take charge.
Dark Relic is indeed set during the Crusades (the first one, not either of the George Bush attempts). A world weary, English Knight tracks down a part of the cross that Christ was crucified on and finally feels as though he has something that justifies the whole bloody war. But as he sets off to return the wood to Blighty, he finds the relic is attracting all manner of plagues and horrors towards its bearer. As he, his men, and assorted people he meets on his journey seek to complete their quest they find that things go bad in a biblical-Job sense.
The most immediate thing that will be noticed by any audience of this movie is how cheap it is. Now I am not a man obsessed by big budgets. Some of my favourite film makers work with low budgets (Hal Hartley and Don Coscarelli, you may take your bows). I will gladly take cheap and ingenuity over expensive and generic any day (Brett Ratner and Michael Bay, you may both take a bullet). But there is just no way to get around just how cheap Dark Relic looks. Everything looks awful – the costumes, the sets, the green screens. If you remember any version of Doctor Who before he was cool and sexy (ie. pre 2000′s) then you can imagine the ‘quality’ of the imagery in Dark Relic. Except you can’t really imagine it, because those old 1970′s Doctor Who episodes must have had ten times the budget of this film. The CGI demon in particular is reminiscent of something from an old arcade fighting game when crazy buzzwords such as ‘rendering’ and ‘polygons’ were blowing the minds of ‘Killer Instinct’ players everywhere. Hell, you can’t even fast forward or rewind the disc. I suppose the extra cost of encoding that feature would have pushed the budget past its 50p limit.
It is clear the screenwriter Andy Briggs had great plans when writing an action film set in the distant past. It was set to feature exotic lands, a large cast, epic battle scenes and even demons from hell. Unfortunately for the director Lorenzo Sena, it seems that he was then given a budget akin to an episode of Postman Pat to try and shoot said script. Because the film is so cheap in every regard it is too impossible to become invested in.
However, despite the film being a literal pain to watch, it is not a total washout. What saves it at all comes down to two factors; firstly the central performance by James Frain. Frain is far better than the material deserves. To be fair to most of the cast, the majority of the performances are better than should be expected. That is not to say they are good necessarily, but at least all of the central cast at least seem committed to delivering their lines with some conviction despite looking as though they are sitting on a discarded Panto set. Ally Khan certainly chews the scenery as the clichéd ‘wise and misunderstood Arab’, but at least he has an easy going charm. Still, it is James Frain alone whom comes out with a respectable nod here.
The second thing that actually saves Dark Relic is its core message. The film tries to bring together the things that Muslims and Christians may have in common; as the film strives further to reinforce the need for equality amongst different sexes, races and religions it at least has a clear morality. This is something which many bigger, more expensive adventure films lack. It should be stressed that most of this morality comes out in rather forced diologues as characters break into debates about the nature of God and the role of evil between bouts of locust attacks and zombie-cannibal-monks (yes, really). Still, it at least it is an upfront attempt at delivering a message highly relevant today, even if it does so with all the subtlety of a grapefruit up the rectum.
Ultimately it is tough to hate a film that clearly had no way of achieving what it set out to do. For ambition and idealism, Dark Relic probably deserves a 4/5. But for the actual finished product it is probably worth a half-point. So a polite average of 2/5 will do nicely.
Rating: 2 stars
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