This movie is a very elaborate joke, with a incredible punchline, but it take 2 hours to get there...

2 hours you will never get back.

So yes there will be spoiler...

Two hours where nothing really happen except a siege, a siege where Rutger Hauer, as the main villain of the movie, explain to us what a siege is (What? We are going to wait for them to get tired and starved? How brilliant!)...well thanks for all the info O mighty King Obvious the first.

After some treason, some tribulations of a guy who like to say to everyone that he as founded the COMPANY OF DEATH and that he is ready to die for FREEDOM. There is also two sisters (I think) one of them as been strike by lightning, witch make her ''special'', and for god know what reason she is the love interest of the movie.

Then after many boring speech where they remind all who can hear that they are the COMPANY OF DEATH they go fight the army of the cruel king...for FREEDOM. Then the joke is on you, after an hilariously bad battle scene, it is revealed that the king got beaten...OFF SCREEN! Yes the main antagonist of the movie die, disappear, got defeated, you really stop to care once you get there, off screen! And then they found the love interest in an Armour... in the middle of the battlefield...for no good reason. Why his she there? how she got there?...we will never know. Then the movie remind us how accurate historically he is. And then the credits. And then you realizing that that movie was just one weird joke.

I don't recommend it, unless you have a very weird sense of humour....

This is about the campaigns to conquer Italy of German Emperor Frederick ,whom the Italians called Barbarossa because he had a red beard.Its obvious that a movie of this scope would need a Hollywood grade-A budget and basically everything grade-A.They didn't have it in this movie,they tried with second-grade actors like Rutger Hauer and a mediocre budget.Which means its not exactly cheap,some battle scenes are pretty decent but its also not exactly satisfying in size and scope of such events.If they had managed to bring to life such historical events,they would be worthy of academy awards.That said,its not bad as a mediocre medieval movie,but its just too small for the story it is undertaking.They could have limited themselves to a smaller part of the Barbarossa campaigns.Yet,for people who like medieval historical movies with battle scenes,its an OK effort.

Stultifyingly long 2 hour epic abut the formation of the Lombard League stuffed full of fascist symbolism and Rutger Hauer. Actually it was really stuffed full of horses.

The script was a real clunker full of people telling each other historically important things the audience need to know but which they would have been fully aware - "Yes, these new taxes that the newly installed Pope Bendict the whateverth are really hurting the people..." Blah blah blah. Real local radio advertising dialogue. "Yes, June with the Lombardy League you get not one but two chances of fighting for...." Blah blah blah.

Mixed in with this guff there was a subplot about a woman who had visions, was due to be burned as a witch - but wasn't by order of the Empress (who burned someone else instead) and ended up, for some totally unexplained reason, in armour on the battlefield (though whose side she was on is anyone's guess).

The only thing that kept me watching, apart from the insane hotness of the witchy woman (Kasia Smutniak), was giggling with glee at every new interior. For some reason (maybe he had shares in a candle company) every interior was full of candles. Inside a peasant's hut late at night as the occupants try to go to sleep there were at least a dozen candles alight in the room. A dungeon cell had another dozen, and when the hero and heroine fall into bed at last, in a ramshackle hut - in daylight! - with sunlight streaming in through every crack and crevice - candles.

It rained on the funeral too. But only only round the grave itself. The people standing in the back were in brilliant sunshine and dry as bones. Between the candle scenes we had the horse scenes. Horses filled up a lot of screen time in this movie. Sometimes they went this way, sometimes they went that way, sometimes they were in slow motion. I would guess a quarter of this film's running time was spent on shots of people riding across the screen. Gallumph gallumph gallumph. People appeared and disappeared from the narrative - and then reappeared when you'd forgotten who they were. (not that you could tell because everyone wore generic medieval brown and had generic medieval dirty hair and beards).

The whole thing looks like it was shot as a miniseries and they cut it down to a movie. Only they cut out the wrong bits.

Another quid wasted in Poundland and another one off my 'Watch Rutger Hauer's Entire Career' list.