Listless 'Reckoning' comes alive too late
Starsky and Hutch aren't the only crime-fighting duo taking up space at a movie theater near you. Although after 100-odd minutes with ``The Reckoning,'' they are the only funny ones. Set in the England of 1390, ``The Reckoning'' casts Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany as two men - an actor and a priest turned actor - trying to save a woman from a public hanging. The movie has none of the embarrassing absurdity and cheap effects that made last year's trip back to the 14th century, ``Timeline,'' such a joke. We should be so lucky. Instead, we get a listless avenger drama.
Bettany plays Father Nicholas, whom we meet on the run, guilty of adultery - and worse. He winds up traveling with an English theater troupe that goes from town to town with a biblical repertory. The band consists of such British reliables as Brian Cox, Gina McKee, and Simon McBurney, all of whom are lead by Dafoe's cagey Martin, the group's mastermind - and, methinks, master thespian.
Nicholas arrives at a transitional moment for the clan. Martin and his sister Sarah (McKee) have just buried their father, who, presumably, was the John Barrymore of the outfit. With dad gone, Martin is thinking about taking things in a new direction. He wants to leave the Bible stories behind, and, over the rest of the stable's objections, move on to fresher material. (Many a supergroup has split up for less.) Martin wants theater that's, well, ripped from the headlines.
The gang comes around when they stumble into the case of a deaf mute woman (Elvira Minguez) accused of murdering a boy. The troop mounts an early production of the incident that upsets the audience, which is made upof people who knew the boy and the woman. The crowd reports that the details in the play are wrong. The mystery sets Nicholas on a corrective investigation. He starts exhuming dead bodies and roughing people up the way Edward Woodward used to on ``The Equalizer.''
Martin, for his part, does a good deal of appearing in the nick of time, and more than once we get gratuitous shots of his limber, sinewy body doing backbends and other cal isthenic moves. Just when you think his movie image couldn't get creepier, Dafoe uses ``The Reckoning'' to scare you into thinking you could walk into the gym and find him teaching your yoga class.
If I've presented this in such a way that it makes you want to run out and see ``The Reckoning'' for yourself, I'd like to apologize. Neither as serious drama nor as mistaken camp is it that engaging. The movie's been adapted by Mark Mills from Barry Unsworth's 1995 novel, ``Morality Play,'' and you can see how Unsworth's notions of turning raw tragedy into raw art, in a media-less age, might be attractive to a moviemaker. But the Scottish director Paul McGuigan inches the film along, until its patience seems unvirtuous, and its allegory both obvious and remote.
The movie does not stint on the period dreariness. Everyone is lousy with misery and even the revelers at the various bacchanals seem glum. Dental work aside, did anybody smile then? Things go from monotonously solemn to borderline inane. This is the kind of movie in which the villains include a Frenchman (Vincent Cassel) who actually says things like ``Between faith and reason lies the one true God: power.''
The justice-seeking and dramatic lifting fall to the pallid Bettany, who, between this film, ``The Heart of Me,'' and ``Master and Commander,'' really deserves more sun. His fire must come from within, for it's tough to recall him ever having been more ferocious than he is in the latter going here. Righteous indignation suits him, as does throwing tight-lipped geezers around. Of course, he doesn't save the movie so much as give it a sense of purpose. But by the time he and the movie heat up, the movie's ready to send us home.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
