Critic Reviews

The story and setting may be ancient, but under the direction of Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), and with a nicely textured screenplay by Macdonald's Scotland coscreenwriter Jeremy Brock, the vigor is fully modern.

The Eagle is full of action and fleet of foot-it's a movie of smoky, lowering battlefields and trippy, space-bending flashbacks, pausing only for admiring location shots of Scotland's wild, craggy vistas.

Do you like movies about gladiators? Well, lend me your ears: The Eagle will more than gratify your sword-and-sandal cravings.

Exciting and even moving, this robust epic is filled with action, male bonding, and a terrifying sense of wilderness.

A rip-snorting adventure tale of the sort made before CGI, 3-D and alphabet soup in general took the fun out of moviegoing.

An honest, basic story set forth with brevity, skill, care and intelligence.

The Eagle is an engaging, if straightforward and one-dimensional.

While the movie doesn't wholly succeed, there's enough to like here -- including Channing Tatum's credible performance as a tradition-bound Roman soldier.

The Eagle is furiously unsettled-thematically, temporally, meteorologically. Wild-eyed, long-haired Brits leap atop the Romans' shields as the soldiers blindly hack away, the bodies so close that you can barely tell the victor from the vanquished. The battles in the fog and rain have a hallucinatory power.

Yes, The Eagle is as bad as it sounds but also entertaining, in a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" sort of way that Macdonald didn't intend.