Agantuk's Desk – Explore, Implore, Reverberate

Finally watched this film which is a bit too long and dragging for two hours. This is about the Czech hero Jan Zizka during the time of King Charles IV when the Bohemian kingdom of the Czech Republic was looking for an able heir to the throne which is opposed by a fraction of the people in France who are backing a second Pope while there is already a Pope in Rome. Michael plays Lord Boresh, a fictional Lord who is trying to save the kingdom with his sound advice. He does a good job with a measured performance but the problem is with ‘Get Carter’ type angry accent at the beginning where he sounds like he will throw off people, from the cliff. He appears in the first 15 mins of the film heavily scorned and returns 1 hour later with a substantial charismatic performance for another 15 mins, especially the death scene monologue.

What stands out in his every acting gig is the way to act in between. How to react when a particular sound is heard, like someone opening a door with a loud bang, like when you are in fear of losing your life as a group of men attacks you. The man keeps mastering this acting with his every outing. And this keeps him in business.

He has only one scene with the hero of the film which is his death scene (in the above two picture). Michael’s best scenes seem to be with King Sigismund played by Matthew Goode (picture given below) and Jan Zizka played by Ben Foster- both of which are in the second half.

About The Film

The film is very weirdly inconceivable and filled with some visceral bloodshed scenes like a lion eating up a soldier, killing a person like a chainsaw type of movement and then dangling the head, hanging and killings at odd angles, the heroine suffering from a Stockholm syndrome type of thing and ultimately falling in love with Jan Zizka who abducts him from the Romans. The woman also treats his wounded eye with some worms she collected from water and ends up trying to kill herself by jumping off at the end of the film, at which point the hero in Jan Zizka arose and he jumps into the water. He kills the villain underwater and comes up with the body of the lady who hands her ring to him and then they walk in prayer with her dead body while an eagle flies high in the sky (the same eagle is there throughout the film)

Bottom Line

Overall the film seems like an influenced copy of too many films together. Like someone watched Game of Thrones, Titanic, the Final Problem in Sherlock Holmes and made it into a story. Not sure how much of the romance is accurate in history. It’s a good one-time watch with the best scenes being Jan Zizka urging everyone to fight after Michael Caine’s death and the lady reacting to killing someone for the first time in life. Those two scenes are worth the watch.Both Ben Foster and Matthew Goode along with the other actors try their best to salvage this film but there isn’t much to do as the fighting scenes and the script falls short. Sophie Lowe who plays Katherine, the abducted woman who falls in love with Jan Zizka does a wonderful job but she doesn’t have many substantial lines and keeps repeating ‘There must have been something wrong’ and ‘Something must have happened’ whenever Jan Zizka and the troubled Czechs try to explain to her about her fiance’s atrocities. She does a fantastic job demonstrating the feeling of stained guilt after killing someone for the first time. German actor Tilman Valentin Schweiger does his best in his limited scope playing Rosenberg. Despite these good performances the film falls short because of the lack of substantial storyline and script and better battle scenes.

I only watched this for a chance to see Michael Caine on screen again and also because of the rare opportunity one gets to see him in a period film. This was his first Czech film and the highest-budget Czech film so far. Earlier he has done similar roles in ‘Last Valley’ which didn’t and on stage as Horatio to Christopher Plummer’s Hamlet in ‘Hamlet at Elsinore’ which was a good attempt to do the play in the Denmark Castle