Saturday, August 3, 2013

Solomon Kane movie good, but falls short of mark set by Robert E. Howard

I finally got the chance to watch the relatively new “Solomon Kane” movie the other day, and while I enjoyed the movie, I felt that it fell far short of the mark Robert E. Howard set for this classic pulp character.

For those of you unfamiliar with Solomon Kane, he’s a fictional adventurer created by writer Robert E. Howard, who is probably best known for being the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Kane was a Puritan swordsman who lived in the late 1500s and early 1600s. His adventurers took him all over the globe, including Africa and Europe, where he fought all sorts of supernatural bad guys.

Kane was an edgy character, who dressed all in black. Not only did he favor swords of all types, but he would also use muskets and flintlock pistols to dispatch the bad guys he encountered. Howard’s first Solomon Kane story, “Red Shadows,” first appeared in the August 1928 edition of Weird Tales magazine, so the Kane character has been around for a while.

To date, the recent “Solomon Kane” movie is the only major motion picture about this famous Howard character. It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2009, but wasn’t released in U.S. theatres until September 2012. It was released on DVD earlier this summer, and I rented it through Netflix.

The movie was written and directed by Michael J. Bassett and starred James Purefoy as Kane. Other cast members included Mackenzie Crook, Jason Fleming, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Alice Krige, Pete Postlethwaite, Samuel Roukin, Ben Steel, Max von Sydow, Ian Whyte and Anthony Wilks. The movie’s rated R and was 104 minutes long.

The movie begins with Kane as a pirate captain, who finds himself as the target of a supernatural being that’s after his soul. Kane seeks refuge at a monastery, but eventually he has to rescue an innocent girl who’s been taken captive by a deranged lord. This local lord turns out to be Kane’s older brother, who he has to face off with in the end.

This movie was pretty good, and people who don’t know much or anything about the Kane character will probably really enjoy it. The story clips along at a nice pace, and the movie includes plenty of action in the way of swordfights and battle scenes. A nice mix of monsters and other unsavory characters also spice up this movie a good bit.

I’ve been a huge fan of Solomon Kane since my first exposure to him in the summer after the fourth-grade, and I’ve read the complete cannon of Howard’s original “Solomon Kane” stories (some more than a few times) in all the years since. While Purefoy’s portrayal of Kane wasn’t bad, for some reason, I felt like it fell well short of the character from Howard’s stories, (about like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayals of Conan the Barbarian).

The only way to see what I mean about the Solomon Kane movie is to read the original Solomon Kane stories for yourself. If you’re interested in reading more about Solomon Kane, I highly recommend that you read “The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane” by Robert E. Howard and illustrated by Gary Gianni. Published by Ballantine Books in 1998, this awesome book contains all of Howard’s original Solomon Kane stories, and I can’t say enough about how cool this book is. Just typing about it makes me want to re-read it all over again.

In the end, how many of you have seen the “Solomon Kane” movie? What did you think about it? Did you like it or not? Let us know in the comments section below.

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