I recently caught up on Pathfinder, a movie that came out last year i.e. 2007, but one that I had not seen. While not a great movie, its undoing is that it runs in the genre of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, 10,000 B.C., which means nothing very worthwhile to write home about. The premise of Pathfinder is interesting, Vikings in their quest for world domination come to the shores of North America and unexplainably all the Nordic warriors are found dead on the ship with the exception of a young boy who is found by a Native American Indian woman and consequently raised by her family as their son. The young boy (Karl Urban) grows up with the Native American Indian tribe, is called Ghost (don’t ask why since it’s never explained), but is never fully accepted by everyone because of his pale skin and also because everyone suspects he will return to his Nordic roots and let loose the beast within him that is the Viking warrior. Karl Urban is in love with Moon Bloodgood from a neighboring village who is herself being courted by Jay Tavare. Russell Means plays the Pathfinder of the tribe i.e. one whose job it is to find the path to be travelled on by the entire tribe.
Into this idyllic world the Viking warriors return once again bringing with them the mayhem and bloodbath that they were world renown for and immediately they set about destroying village after village of Native American Indians. Karl Urban’s village too ends up being the target and its time for the entire tribe to be decapitated Hollywood style. Karl Urban however manages to live and fight another day simply because he was out hunting when the attack takes place. Now its up to Karl Urban to dish out justice to the Viking warriors, combined with his Viking warrior skills that he learned as a young boy and the stealth of the Native American Indian that he has learned from his Native American Indian upbringing, and how he sets about plotting and taking revenge on the Vikings and goes about systematically killing them off forms the rest of the story.
Karl Urban from the Lord Of The Rings and The Bourne Supremacy disappoints and basically Pathfinder suffers from this more than anything else. Karl Urban’s Viking warrior/Native American Indian Warrior is a rather weak and insipid hero/avenging angel and he totally pales in comparison with the hefty and muscular Viking warriors that form the bad guys. If there was ever a case for a Conan kind of body this was it and Karl Urban should have toned up on that body of his at least to begin with. Even his silent, brooding, non-talking hero is lost on us and with his failure its obvious Pathfinder too fails to deliver. Another department where Pathfinder fails is in the action department. The movie and Karl Urban might have worked out much better if the makers had decided to make an action flick instead of meandering towards Native American Indian legends, white horses/unicorns showing up in dreams, prophecies foretold, etc. All of this is lost on the viewers as it is since they are never carried to their fulfillment and only serve to fill in the gaps between the narration. It would have been a lot better if they had been left out altogether and filled instead with adrenaline pumping action all the way. The brooding, silent intensity in Ang Lee’s Hulk did not work and neither does it work here. Pathfinder could have been so much better with the premise of an adopted Viking fighting against other Vikings in tying to save his adopted country and Native American Indians who have brought him up, but unfortunately Pathfinder refuses to tread the “path” less traveled and neither does it work as an action adventure.
Tags: Clancy Brown, Jay Tavare, Karl Urban, Marcus Nispel, Moon Bloodgood, Pathfinder Movie Review, Russell Means