Solomon Kane is so serious. For certain people this is great news, as the idea of an ass-kicking Puritan hunting down foul demons and things that go bump in the night has an obviously unintentionally campy component to it, and the original pulp stories by Robert E. Howard are pretty serious stuff, or at least they take themselves pretty seriously. For others this is going to be a huge problem, as the silliness inherent in the concept and in some of the low-budget sword and sorcery on display is too obvious to ignore.

For my part I rolled with it, although I found myself suddenly torn from the movie in moments when Solomon Kane (James Purefoy, often looking a bit like Hugh Jackman's butch-ier stand-in) would look up at a giant CGI creature and say 'Good lord' in prayerful earnestness. Maybe it's just the training I've received during a generation of genre film watching, but thats' when the hero makes a joke or a wisecrack of some sort, or at least says 'Good lord' in a kind of funny, 'Holy shit I'm in over my head,' fashion. But Kane is really just praying to the lord to help him dispatch this latest enemy. With all total seriousness.

But I guess without that seriousness you couldn't have a movie where your hero rips himself off a cross and then jumps into battle. And said 'Cross, ripping self off from' scene is probably the litmus test for writer/director Michael J. Bassett's commitment to the uber-seriousness of the concept and the character. If he can keep a straight face in that scene, he means it - and Bassett pours on the drama, pathos, driving rain and grimness in that moment.

Grim is probably as good a word as any to describe the film. The opening scene made me think I might be in for something a little different; as Solomon Kane, a plunder-seeking British sea captain, attacks and infiltrates a castle the film seemed to offer up fun in the Ray Harryhausen tradition. Kane and his men first battle through what appear to be a bunch of Moors or Arabs to gain entrance to a hall filled with mirrors. At the other end of the hall is a doorway, behind which presumably lies vast treasure. In each of the mirrors floats a menacing-looking wraith, and as Kane and his nameless group walk through them, wraiths jump from the glasses and pull sailors to their existential dooms, all while Kane marches forward and orders his men to do the same. You can just see Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews variety) leading his men through a very similar peril.

But Solomon Kane offers few other 'fun' moments. Bassett is definitely going for something more along the lines of 'kick ass,' and he generally manages to get there, even despite a low budget for a film that has big ambitions. When Kane gets through the mirrors he discovers the whole thing was a trap, and that the Devil has laid claim to his soul and intends to collect. Narrowly escaping, Kane repents for his life of sin and tries to walk the path of peace, but as any guy who is good at killing but renounces it finds in the movies, you can't just drop the sword and expect peace to greet you with open arms.

It takes Kane a little while to get back into the slaughtering swing of things - a little while that is less painful than it could have been for the audience thanks to some deft direction by Bassett - but sure enough he's eventually cleaving skulls and chopping pieces off of people, although in this case the people end up being innocents who have been possessed by an evil that is blighting the land. Most of Kane's enemies are the demonic possession form of the stormtrooper - ie, nameless, faceless bits of cannon fodder - although there is one very Deadite-seeming witch and, always just at the end of the next level, a masked baddie who serves a more powerful but hidden master.

So none of it is terribly original. Much of it is suitably kick ass, though, and Bassett and Purefoy create a Kane who is very badass in that way which appeals to 15 year old boys - emotionless, driven, grim n' gritty. His world is just as grim n' gritty; Bassett has created a 16th century England that's post-apocalyptic and filthy. A snow keeps falling throughout the movie and to me it looked like ash, like a nuclear winter had just been visited upon this land. It's effective, and it's just one layer of the grime, filth, putrocity and decay Bassett layers on the film. The art design of the film is unclean, and I mean that in the best possible way. It's also huge; while the budget may have been slim the world created is big, and Bassett never misses a chance to layer on a detail that will add dimension and originality to any location or shot, whether it be a man hanging from a tree or a background ruffian in a bar. There are films with triple the budget that fail to create a world as convincing or immersive.

Kane's driven by a need to redeem himself that's utterly selfish in nature - namely that he doesn't want to burn in hell - and I would have liked to see the film focus more on that. Isn't there an inherent hypocrisy in doing good deeds just to save your own soul? No one really calls Kane out on it, but it seems to me like a philosophical/theological debate worth having. Especially with a film this serious. This is an origin film, though (and not based on any of Kane's chronicled adventures, Bassett said), so there's still plenty of room to explore this aspect of the character in a potential sequel.

There's also room for improvement in a potential sequel. Bassett's script is episodic and formless; while the baddies are always the same, Kane stumbles through them without a sense of a mission for far too long. Even the mission he does get is abandoned for a little while in another small episode. Many of the episodes feel disconnected (especially a sequence with Mackenzie Crook as a priest) to the point that they could probably be cut from the film altogether and little would be lost. The main story, about the evil wizard blighting the land, keeps getting lost, and while the masked baddie shows up throughout, he never gets a chance to show off how tough he is until the end - he just keeps riding up on his horse, as if these scenes were spliced in after the fact to give a bunch of Solomon Kane shorts an overarching story. If Bassett gets a chance to return to the world of this tough guy Pilgrim I hope he brings a tighter script with him.

I would like to see Bassett come back. I think there's fun to be had with this character, and I hope the fun gets found (Solomon Kane may be the only movie where I've ever wished for a comedic sidekick). And that Bassett gets a couple more dollars to play with. The scenes featuring monsters and the supernatural are the best scenes in Solomon Kane, and I'd be happy to see more of them in the sequel. Along with a couple more smiles.

7.5 out of 10