Wannabe Czech Epic Medieval Makes Jan Žižka as Generic as Possible
Going in blind to Medieval, your expectations may be set for a bland swordfighting movie where peasants and nobles clash for indecipherable reasons. Land, maybe, or something to do with heirs. A maiden probably gets saved but, because it’s 2022, she probably also to kill somebody as a form of shorthand feminism. Medieval is truly as generic as its name, but just below the surface are tantalizingly specific details so worn down, disregarded or covered by fashionable subgenre hokum that it makes the whole affair twice as disappointing. The third movie from Czech stuntman-turned-filmmaker Petr Jákl, whose first films became box office record-setters in his home country, Medieval isn’t just any piece of throwaway direct-to-video schlock: It’s the life of Jan Žižka, Czech national hero, and (some claim) the most expensive Czech film ever made. That pedigree makes it even less than your average Game of Thrones bandwagoner in that it could’ve actually stood for something. But absent any legible mythmaking, coherent context or memorable imagery, Medieval will make the history books for all the wrong reasons.
Jákl, turning ideas from a handful of people including his Ghoul co-writer Petr Bok into a script, fabricates an origin story for Žižka (Ben Foster). It’s a confounding choice. A cinematic reintroduction of the military underdog—the last major Žižka biopic was spread across a 1950s trilogy from filmmaker Otakar Vávra—focused on everything but the events that made him famous? We’d all rather see Žižka’s groundbreaking military inventions, his hardline nationalist defense in the face of religious persecution and his legendary leadership in large (expensive to shoot) battles than his days as a mercenary. But that seems hard. Not only objectively, but to fit into the current paradigm of medieval action. Still, it’s like filming a movie about George Washington, but only about his time screwing around with the Virginia militia in his 20s. And also you just made some stuff up to make it feel more like a movie.
We don’t see why Žižka creates his game-changing instruments of war, nor how he does so in any detail. Armored wagons and weaponized flails—the tools that helped his poor, outmatched Hussites overcome Pope-pushed crusaders—simply appear, under his command but without connection. We don’t see Žižka as a particularly skilled, daring, populist or benevolent commander, but as someone in charge of troops who’re already versed in his signature defensive tactics. He is both unestablished and fully fleshed, a symptom of an arcless character desiring unearned familiarity. For all of Foster’s compassionate grimacing, the standard Hollywood face of a sympathetic action hero, his Žižka is 1400s-era clipart.
This confused construction leaves Medieval lost in time and place: It’s too specific to be a true piece of plug-and-play genre fluff, where structure alone dictates content, and too bland to be the historical epic its filmmaker sometimes seems to think it is.
Whispers of the past—the coming Hussite Wars, noble corruption, the Christian schism—pass us by, drowned out by cheesy love interests and brother-avenging silliness. That’s only partially because of the dialogue, mixed so low you can barely discern what accent the Czech-cashing Hollywood cast members are speaking with. The aural disinterest in anything but clanging steel and squelching flesh reflects Medieval’s ideological emptiness. More memorable is Michael Caine’s expository voiceover, because it’s accompanied by on-screen text that matches just one of the sentences, chosen seemingly at random, that he says during any given burst of narration. It’s frustrating to be so close to learning something, to understanding that Žižka was and continues to represent something greater than the movie’s characterization, which feels like it was written to fill the back of an eyepatched action figure’s cardboard packaging.