Once it moves past some choppy early scenes and a ponderous midsection, Kevin MacDonald's The Eagle hits its stride as an exciting historical adventure, enlivened by good performances and locations that look almost primeval. The setting is 140 A.D., a time when Rome rules the known and unknown worlds. The screenplay by Jeremy Brock (who wrote director MacDonald's The Last King of Scotland) pivots off Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, covering the disappearance of a Roman legion and the loss of its symbolic standard, the treasured Eagle.
Channing Tatum plays Marcus Aquila, son of a disgraced leader blamed for the loss of his 5,000 troops. So shameful was this defeat, in MacDonald and Block's telling, that the emperor Hadrian walled off the northern territory and its murderous populace beyond Roman Britain. To restore his family name, Aquila sets out to learn his father's fate and bring back the Eagle — a task that means slipping past Hadrian's Wall into the brutal Caledonian wilderness. His only ally is a Briton slave, Esca (Jamie Bell), whose loyalties become less and less clear the farther they get from Roman territory.
Inevitably, debate has already sprung up over The Eagle's historical accuracy. MacDonald has conceded that for plot purposes he has the tribes speaking in a language (Gaelic) that wasn't introduced until two centuries later, while geographers and historians disagree over how far the Roman Empire extended into what's now Scotland and Britain. From a moviegoer's perspective, these carps are less of a problem than a plodding expository section with Donald Sutherland as the hero's sympathetic uncle.
But once the movie's focus narrows to Tatum and Bell, the former's rugged brawn playing off the latter's deliberately hard-to-read calculation and guile, it turns into a harrowing man-against-the-elements tale in the vein of John Boorman or Werner Herzog. It's helped by strong acting in key supporting roles — most notably Tahar Rahim, the young French-Algerian actor who made a head-turning breakthrough in last year's prison drama A Prophet, who's chilling as a ruthless tribal adversary of Terminator-like determination.
There's also a welcome minimum of CGI overkill, with combat and chase scenes that emphasize real exertion and solid ground over the exaggerated movements and cartoon superheroics that are now the norm for period pieces and action films. (Thank cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, a Danny Boyle/Harmony Korine veteran whose eye for coarse natural texture and heaviness gives the movie a raw physicality.) The Eagle is more a diverting yarn than a fully successful epic, but it offers ample entertainment over its 114 minutes — although here's hoping the suggestion of a sequel goes the way of the missing legion.Â
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