Red Sonja review – pixie-ish Matilda Lutz steps into Brigitte Nielsen's battle corset for action remake
Little-known actor Matilda Lutz gets the lead role this time around, as well as getting all the hair extensions in the auburn aisle. She presents a Sonja that's more a pixie-like hippy chick than Nielsen's Valkyrie heroine, a bit of a loner who mostly kicks around the forest with her beloved horse. Sonja finds herself sucked, at first unenthusiastically, into camaraderie after she is captured by evil emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan, clearly enjoying himself) and compelled to fight in gladiatorial combats. Sometimes her opponents are the other prisoners, and sometimes they are gargantuan amalgamations of pixels and VFX fairy dust, including a grumpy cyclops roughly the size of a tower block who is controlled by Draygan with what looks like a magic torch. Wallis Day plays another antagonist with bleached eyebrows and agonising visions of all the people she's ever killed, just to show that baddies have backstories too.
Indeed, there's quite a lot of backstorying going on here, with lashings of flashbacks as we find out how Sonja came to be a lonely child of the forest, how other characters got roped into all this, and even what makes Draygan so mean. The action sequences, which are what made the original Sonja so indelible (especially since Nielsen had Arnold Schwarzenegger as a co-star), are a bit more rote. But someone somewhere must have done a punch-up on the script, because every now and then a reasonably witty quip arrives out of nowhere before the dialogue reverts to faux medieval speak.
Red Sonja is on digital platforms from 18 August, and on DVD & Blu-ray from 8 September
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Nobody 2 review – Bob Odenkirk's suburban tough guy beats action sequel into submission
Bob Odenkirk's unlikely new career journey as a kickass tough guy continues in this pretty formulaic and forgettable sequel to the amusing original hit, which first showed us Hutch (Odenkirk), an apparent suburban nobody with wife-plus-kids who keeps forgetting to put the garbage out in time – then from nowhere busts out some serious fight moves. This sequel from Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, co-written by the writer of the original, Derek Kolstad, really doesn't have much of the humour and the storytelling chutzpah of the first film. But what it does have, inevitably, are endless gonzo fight sequences in which Hutch is unfairly matched against half a dozen or so humongous goons, and winds up reducing these bullies to cat litter. There was a big scene in the first film set on a bus, and it seems to have become the Nobody franchise's USP. The idea now is that Hutch is still working as an assassin but neglecting his family, so he insists on taking them all on a summer break to a cheesy vacation resort with a goofy water slide and silly cabins – a place to which his dad, the lovably cantankerous grandpa played by Christopher Lloyd, who comes along too – once took him when he was a kid. Inevitably Hutch gets involved with local bad guys, including a corrupt sheriff (Colin Hanks) and sadistically mean crime boss Lendina, played by Sharon Stone. And so the six-against-one punch-ups continue, to diminishing effect, with a massive war-zone-style finale in a funfair. The film does contrive to produce a dog for Hutch at the film's beginning and end, in an obvious attempt to pump up his family-guy relatability. Odenkirk sells it conscientiously enough, although his fans may still prefer to remember his harassed lawyer in TV's Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, or his psychotherapist in Arrested Development. Nobody 2 is out on 14 August in Australia, and on 15 August in the UK and US.
The Guardian
29 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Nobody 2 review – Bob Odenkirk's suburban tough guy beats action sequel into submission
Bob Odenkirk's unlikely new career journey as a kickass tough guy continues in this pretty formulaic and forgettable sequel to the amusing original hit, which first showed us Hutch (Odenkirk), an apparent suburban nobody with wife-plus-kids who keeps forgetting to put the garbage out in time – then from nowhere busts out some serious fight moves. This sequel from Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, co-written by the writer of the original, Derek Kolstad, really doesn't have much of the humour and the storytelling chutzpah of the first film. But what it does have, inevitably, are endless gonzo fight sequences in which Hutch is unfairly matched against half a dozen or so humongous goons, and winds up reducing these bullies to cat litter. There was a big scene in the first film set on a bus, and it seems to have become the Nobody franchise's USP. The idea now is that Hutch is still working as an assassin but neglecting his family, so he insists on taking them all on a summer break to a cheesy vacation resort with a goofy water slide and silly cabins – a place to which his dad, the lovably cantankerous grandpa played by Christopher Lloyd, who comes along too – once took him when he was a kid. Inevitably Hutch gets involved with local bad guys, including a corrupt sheriff (Colin Hanks) and sadistically mean crime boss Lendina, played by Sharon Stone. And so the six-against-one punch-ups continue, to diminishing effect, with a massive war-zone-style finale in a funfair. The film does contrive to produce a dog for Hutch at the film's beginning and end, in an obvious attempt to pump up his family-guy relatability. Odenkirk sells it conscientiously enough, although his fans may still prefer to remember his harassed lawyer in TV's Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, or his psychotherapist in Arrested Development. Nobody 2 is out on 14 August in Australia, and on 15 August in the UK and US.
The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Drag Me to Hell star Lorna Raver dies aged 81 after lengthy career appearing in ER, Desperate Housewives & Star Trek
THE actress Lorna Raver, who starred in the horror movie Drag Me To Hell, has died at the age of 81. Raver died on May 12 but her death wasn't announced until earlier this week. 2 2 Her career spanned decades, which saw her make cameo appearances in shows such as ER, Desperate Housewives, and Star Trek: Voyager. .
