Iron & Blood The Legend of Taras Bulba   Starring: Bogdan Stupka, Igor Petrenko and Vladimir Vdovichenkov Metrodome RRP: £15.99 MTD5639 Certificate: 15 Available 22 August 2011

Tiring of his life as a farmer, Taras Bulba takes the first opportunity, to leave. Unable to put behind him his warriors ways, he plans to forge his two sons, Ostap (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) and Andriy (Igor Petrenko), into warriors for the inevitable war with Poland. Although Ostap takes on the life of a Cossack with ease, Andriy love affair with a polish princess increases the tension between father and son...

Iron & Blood: The Legend of Taras Bulba (2009 - 2 hrs, 5 min, 32 sec), is a historical epic, directed by Vladimir Bortko, and adapted from Nikolai Gogol’s famous novel.

The film opens with a pretty bad scene of Bulba doing a poor man’s version of Laurence Olivier’s pre-battle speech from Henry V (1944). Whereas the latter is a rousing call to arms, Bulba’s version feels like it’s been delivered after a few too many vodkas.

Skip back in time to where the previously blood thirsty warlord has literally traded in his sword for a plough and we are presented with a very different Bulba. No longer content to follow the path of peace, Bulba longs for the good old days of blood and death.

One of the main problems with Bogdan Stupka’s portrayal of Taras, is that, for the most part he comes across as a boorish and unsympathetic character. Within the first ten minutes of the film, he has manipulated his own sons into a fist fight, presumably to prove how manly he is, having objected to them returning home following their education.

What follows is a story of war and family. Spurred on by the murder of his wife, by the Polish - we skip over the part where he abandoned his family, leaving them defenceless to go and play war - he leads the Cossacks in a war of revenge against the Poles and the Jews.

The film has a number of issues, there is a strong thread of anti-Semitism and racism in the piece. Given that it was funded by the Russian government, its attitude to both its Russian identity and how other peoples are viewed boarders on nationalistic propaganda and dangerous propaganda at that. To be honest I can’t remember such a blatant piece being made since World War Two.

So, politics aside, is the film any good? Well the answer would have to be yes and no. The acting is solid, even if it is difficult to think of the ageing Stupka as an action hero, able to defeat men half his age. The overly long script could have done with trimming as after the first hour it feels too bloated, watering down what could have been a nice character study with numerous battles, whose use of the close and medium shot, gives you the feeling that your probably watching the same thirty to fifty actors running round a field, although this improves as the film progresses. As such, the film lacks a sense of the epic it was obviously trying to achieve.

The disc has no extras on it, the picture is not as sharp as you’d expect from a modern movie, neither is the stereo, Russian, soundtrack. There are burned in subtitles.

Propaganda is nothing new, America has been churning out films extolling the virtues of capitalism and democracy for decades and had Iron & Blood been a good film, this jingoism could have been overlooked; however in the final analysis the film is fair to middling, at best.

5

Charles Packer