My opinion of Focus Feature’s “The Eagle” can be summed up in the sentence, “Yup, that was a movie.”

Everything in the film is done well enough that I wasn’t offended by its mere existence, but, on the other hand, I won’t be paying to see this movie again anytime soon.  It was fun for the 114 minutes it lasted, but I don’t want to turn my experience with “The Eagle” into a 228 minute one.

The film has everything checked off on the list of successful action movie techniques; the acting is decent, the soundtrack sets the tone for each scene well, and the cinematography uses that surefire trick of making action scenes interesting by strapping the camera to a paint shaker.

At the same time, this isn’t a soundtrack that will be mentioned in the same sentence as a John Williams score, and Channing Tatum isn’t going to win any awards for his portrayal of Marcus Flavius Aquila.

Aside from an oddly placed and mood breaking “bro-ment” to close out the film, I don’t really have anything in particular that I can point to and say, “This is the reason why I didn’t love this movie.”

“The Eagle” was competent.  Nothing more, nothing less.

But that raises the question; does every movie need to be an amazing billion dollar box office hit and win 10 Oscars for it to be worth watching? In the end, there are many movies that deserve to be erased from existence that have made more money at the box office than “The Eagle” ever will. The “Scary Movie” series says hi.

~Troy Patton

I have one word to say about the new gladiator thriller, “The Eagle”: meh.

After seeing the trailer I was somewhat excited, but thought it would be just another movie with a whole bunch of killing and the possibility of a deep story line.

Unfortunately, after watching “The Eagle,” I thought, “That was decent.” Ultimately, this was the movie’s downfall.

There were about four peaks of action throughout that were thrilling enough. I was waiting for a bloody-mcblooderton kill-fest. But no.

I didn’t think that Channing Tatum could top his previous blockbusters, like “Dear John” and “Step Up,” but he was surprisingly good. However, some of the other actors  tendency towards speaking as if they were in a 1980’s office ruined it for me.

While Tatum and his costar, Jamie Bell, are travelling through the open terrain, some spots were interesting and beautiful and some were ugly and dead enough to fit the mood.

There was a decent story, a decent amount of fights between gladiators and barbarians, a decent score and a decent amount of homoerotic tension, which adds up to a wholly decent film.

Throughout the film, there was nothing spectacularly bad or good. Everything – from the acting to the backdrops to the music to the makeup – was disappointingly average.

All in all, “The Eagle” was so average it was boring and forgettable.

When the credits started rolling, someone started to clap. I would have slapped him if I wasn’t two seconds from a boredom-induced coma.

~Julius Rea