The film is very near a comedy, and I'm not sure that's on purpose. Starring Gerard Butler (the Phantom of 2004's ``The Phantom of the Opera," of which we will say no more for fear of scaring the livestock), ``Beowulf & Grendel" is a watchably ludicrous mishmash. It features gorgeous Icelandic settings, portentous intertitles, and dialogue by way of ``Monty Python and the Holy Grail." If you've had a few grogs, it's actually kind of fun.
The story, in case you slept through third-period English, is this: King Hrothgar of the Danes (Stellan Skarsgaard) has built a great banquet hall called Herot that's plagued by bloody visitations from a monster named Grendel (Ingvar Eggert Sigurosson). Enter Beowulf of the Geats, handsome and possessed of a seriously vorpal sword. He rips off Grendel's arm in battle and sends him off to die, which only provokes the monster's mother (Elva Osk Olafsdottir) to rise from the sea in wrath. More swordplay, more triumph; in the poem there's a later bit with a dragon, but the movie doesn't go there.
Instead, ``Beowulf & Grendel" aims for something between realism and B-movie mythmaking. The monster is referred to by the Danes as a troll, and he's a big, hairy fella; there's a possibility he may even be a Neanderthal remnant eking out survival during the rise of Homo sapiens. In practice, he doesn't get to do much besides snarl and play nine-pins with the heads of his victims.
Over in Herot, things are spiraling out of control. Skarsgaard, a talented actor who realizes he's signed up for a losing game, gives us a method Hrothgar, funny, odd, and occasionally moving. ``Think you need a beer?" he asks the newly arrived hero; later, quizzed about the monster's motivations, he snaps, ``Oh, Beowulf, it's a [expletive] troll! Maybe someone looked at it wrong!" Truly, this is a king with huge tracts of land.
