River Queen (2005)

Synopsis: In 1854, in New Zealand, an Irish woman has a son with a Maori man. Her lover dies shortly after that, and his father kidnaps her child. She is then offered a deal by which she will have her son back if she agrees to go to a distant village to heal its Maori chief. While she is there, a war breaks out between the English and the Maori.

Appraisal: This film is characterized by some crudeness in technique (brisk camera movements, for example) and in writing (an enormous amount of voice-over); it also has a penchant for kitschy accessories such as the new-age score, and the overuse of slow-motion. All these flaws permeate the film more or less uniformly from beginning to end. The characters are not endowed with much depth, which in this case is partially overcome by an emphasis on action. The film does improve in the second half, with quite complex battle sequences; the general course of the story acquires some complexity as well, and in general lines does not stray too much from the path of logic and coherence.

Rating: 45