I have had my eye on Ironclad for a long, long time.  The initial casting reports pegged it as a pure medieval action movie — loose in fact, heavy on gore and sheer badassery.

You couldn’t pick a better historical story to base an action movie around. The Siege of Rochester Castle in 1215 wasn’t a major point in history — even if it did star one of fiction’s  favorite medieval villains, King John — but it was long, gruesome, full of heroics and appalling barbarity.  The fate of the Rochester rebels wasn’t a happy one.

Whether Ironclad keeps the grim ending remains to be seen, but it does offer a lot of screaming, swords, pithy lines, and gleeful scenery chewing by Paul Giamatti.   There’s a vaguely 1980s flavor to this — maybe it’s Kate Mara’s headband, maybe it’s the stark Conanish style, but I like it.  It’s not really pretending to be anything grand. It is  what it promised to be — an action movie set in the 13th century.

Check out the trailer below.  I’m sold, but then I’ll watch anything that combines James Purefoy, tabards, and a rocking guitar riff. How can that mix let me down?

[via Cinema Blend]