Past Misdeeds: Solomon Kane (2009)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


It's the year 1600. Mercenary captain Solomon Kane (James Purefoy) is a rather nasty man with a mean disposition, but of excellent talent in the killing arts. While on one of his plunder and pillage escapades with his men, Kane meets a large, faceless charmer of a guy wielding a flaming sword who introduces himself as "the devil's reaper", come to bring Kane's soul to where it belongs.

With luck, the mercenary survives his fight with the creature and escapes. One year later, the film finds its protagonist in England, where he is spending time in a monastery. Which is quite an achievement seeing that there were no monasteries in England at that time anymore; scriptwriters of period pieces should sometimes look into a history book of the era their movies take place in.

His encounter with the reaper has put the fear of the devil into Kane, and he has forsworn his wicked and violent ways and sworn never to take human life again. Alas, the monastery's abbot has had a vision. Seems like god told him to send Kane away to return to his childhood home.

Kane has some very unpleasant (noble) family baggage, though, and is not at all willing to go back to his ancestral castle. Be that as it may, the man obviously can't stay in the monastery when the abbot's imaginary friend says no, so he leaves and wanders the country, doing his best to be non-violent. On his travels, he meets the Crowthorn family, a handful of brave puritans on their way to America. Kane and the Crowthorns take a real liking to each other, and since this is a film with a redemption plot, this does not bode well for Pete Postlethwaite, Alice Krige and their children.

A horde of not completely human raiders under the leadership of a demonic masked fighter (Samuel Roukin) roams the land, killing many people and taking others as slaves. The Crowthorns and Kane have a run-in with one of the raider groups, an encounter that convinces Kane to take up killing again, if now for a better cause. Even with Kane's regained fighting spirit, the raiders kill the male members of the family and take daughter Meredith (Rachel-Hurd Wood) with them. Kane promises the dying Crowthorn to rescue his daughter whatever the cost, leaving Mrs Crowthorn behind alone in the deep dark woods to fend for herself. Very heroic.

Little does the ex-pacifist know that his way to redemption will lead him (after some adventures and detours) back to his family castle.

After the less than promising trailers and the not exactly excited sounding reviews, I went into Solomon Kane expecting the worst. As it turns out, the film isn't as bad as I had feared at all.

As an admirer of the Kane stories of Robert E. Howard this film is supposedly based on, I would not have been optimistic going into a film like this even under more promising circumstances. I was right with not being optimistic about the film in this regard: as a Howard adaptation, Solomon Kane isn't a success at all. Kane is more like an alternative world version of Howard's character than the one I know from the stories. Both Kanes might share their obsessiveness and their fighting prowess, but where the literary figure is driven by a sense of justice and adventure lust he can't admit to himself, movie-Kane is on a by-the-script-writers'-rule-book search for redemption, a search that a contemporary film script of course has to frame with family connections to the source of evil. A simple search for redemption just isn't personal enough anymore, and a hero just being a kick-ass demon-hunting adventurer is of course right out. In the tradition that has already annoyed me in more than one superhero movie, this is an origin story in which everything that is happening has deep connections with the protagonist's history, making his good deeds deeply solipsistic at their core instead of selfless and truly heroic.

This utterly predictable streak is the film's big weakness. Well, it and the tendency to lay the pathos on so thick that I suspect people have drowned in it during the production. I dare anyone not to giggle at the crucifixion scene; and yes, of course Kane rips himself off the cross, as is traditional in Sword and Sorcery films, in contrast to certain other crucifixions.

Having said that, I also have to admit that these shortcomings don't drag the film down as much I would have expected. The plot may be so bog-standard in its ideas more sensitive people will probably want to scream, but its execution is a lot more exciting to watch than you'd think. Director Michael J. Bassett manages to imbue his film with exactly the right feel for a pulpy, semi-historical Sword and Sorcery film. The film gets the needed mood of grimness and slight unreality just right, creating a world of fog, dirt and a bit of snow. It works on the part of the imagination that delights in Frank Frazetta paintings.

Another strength are the film's action scenes, at once grim and cool in a heavy metal record cover sense. They are even dynamic and thrilling enough to let one ignore the weakness of the CGI effects. Only the Grand Finale disappoints in this regard, but I'd rather put that on the boringness of the movie's big bad and Bassett's too conservative scriptwriting (again) than on his ability at directing good action scenes.

While there really isn't much room to do anything impressive on the acting front for anyone, I am still quite impressed with James Purefoy's performance. The actor does a fine job of deliberate, yet subtle overacting and treats his character's standard redemption arc as if it were Shakespeare. There's a seriousness about his approach to Kane that makes this one-dimensional character at times nearly feel like a charismatic person, possibly even someone whose redemption would be a good thing. Plus, Purefoy is also pretty good in the action scenes. One can't help but wonder how excellent Purefoy would have been as Howard's Kane.


Solomon Kane is a terribly flawed film. I would have wished for it to be either more imaginative or at least closer to Howard than it being generic historical pulp fantasy, to be a bit more willing to take risks with its narrative, but in the end, I can't say that it isn't fun, at times even exciting, to watch.