Solomon Kane is a bad man – ooh, he’s very bad. So bad, that his soul has been claimed by the devil. He’s determined to find redemption through peace, but these baddies just keep pushing and pushing him until… well. Michael J. Bassett’s (Deathwatch) movie is essentially a twist on westerns such as Unforgiven, transplanted to a miserable, rain-soaked England in the dying days of Tudor rule. It takes time to establish the character with all the solemn depth that you’d expect from Kane’s pulp fiction origins – he undergoes superhuman suffering and spiritual turmoil, in the way that such characters do, all conveyed with admirable commitment from a strangely believable James Purefoy.
This is no mean feat, considering the constant supernatural and biblical references (apparently asexual by way of spiritual purity, at one point, he is even crucified). In lesser hands the film could have simply been about waiting for the ‘bad ass moment’, the time when Kane’s resistance to violence is cracked by some unimaginable piece of suffering, and he slaughters everyone in a really cool way. (In other films, this is often signalled by facial twitches after a baddie says something particularly nasty. Or the provocation to lure Clint Eastwood out of retirement for some ‘unfinished business’.) The movie is about these moments, but they’re something to get excited about, not the sole reason for enjoying it – there’s a grounding and a heart to Purefoy’s performance, one heavily informed by the friendly Puritan (Pete Postlethwaite) who takes him in.
As a result, Solomon Kane keeps at least one foot firmly on the ground throughout. The ‘bad ass’ fights have an earthy thunk about them – no sub-Matrix showboating – and the truly otherworldly enemies bracket rather than litter the film. The increasingly grim, consistently rainy Czech and British locations echo the mood of Deathwatch (a similar location split), and do their part in helping you to think of this as just a really, really bad day.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 