Beowulf & Grendel - Reception

Reception

The film received generally mixed and average reviews from professional critics; it scored 53% at Metacritic and 48% at Rotten Tomatoes. Most critics praised the film's cinematography, its brutal action sequences, and aspects of its revisionist script, but criticised the dialogue and some of the acting.

William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes, "The film's near-fatal flaw is its dialogue, which had to be invented wholesale from the Old English text. It alternates between sounding stagy and anachronistically hip – with more overuse of the F-word than any two Samuel L. Jackson movies. It's a big mistake." Nevertheless, Arnold eventually recommends the film for "keeping its strain of rowdiness and violence in control, and lending the tale the kind of somber respect filmmakers tend to give adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens."

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly commends director Gunnarsson for his " on the more interesting psychology of tribalism." Bill Gallo of Village Voice writes, "It's good, bloody fun that stirs the intellect whenever it feels like it, and as a swashbuckler, the dead-game Butler outswings just about anyone in Troy or Kingdom of Heaven or Tristan & Isolde."

The film has at least one major champion in Danél Griffin of Film as Art (for University of Alaska Southeast), who claims it "exists on the same plane of unadulterated genius as other mad, operatic visions like von Stroheim's Greed, Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Leone's Once Upon a Time in America." He hails the film for its reinterpretation of the poem as "a study of sharp contrast our ego-inflated perception versus the more humbling reality of our existence.... Gunnarsson and Berzins' ultimate conclusion is that we are creatures of the world, not creatures above or below it, and for all of our theology and philosophy and courage and civility, there is Grendel's severed arm nailed to our castle, and this trophy makes us feel good about ourselves. Its gory depravity representing our feelings of triumph transforms into one of the most revealing metaphors in all of literature."

Other critics are less forgiving. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle says, "Imagine the worst Deadwood episode ever, and you'll get an idea of the general tone of Beowulf & Grendel, which is full of anachronistic cursing, tortured syntax, dark humor and lots of hairy, homely, filthy-looking people. The filmmakers get their point across in about 30 minutes, leaving 70 more for severed heads and period charm. There's no charm."

Todd McCarthy of Variety (magazine) agrees, writing, "Director Sturla Gunnarsson seems aware of the savagery intrinsic to the story, but is unable to mine it deeply, proving too genteel in the end to make a genuinely creepy or disturbing film." Liam Lacey of The Globe and Mail concludes, "The movie is a lumbering and ludicrous mess."