Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls (2008)

Written by CinemaSerf on June 4, 2022

A straight remake of H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" that really does beggar belief! Aside from some decent location photography, this is about as action free an adventure film as I think I have ever seen. A mean and moody Sean Cameron Michael takes the title role, with Christopher Adams really pretty hammy as baddie "Hartford"; Natalie Stone pouts magnificently as "Lady Anna" with the weak and feeble, almost preppie, Daniel Bonjour ("Sir Henry") bringing up the rear as they search for the latter man's long lost brother "Neville" (Nick Everhart). Simply, this is an howler with virtually no redeeming features aside from being marginally less static than my television screen-saver. The dialogue and score offer little by way of a lifeline for this totally unnecessary re-versioning of a great adventure story reduced here to some posh accents, way too much chatter and hardly any actual vitality at all. There is a slight twist at the end from the book, but that really can't make anything like enough of a difference to rescue this from then doldrums of abject mediocrity in which it belongs. I just wouldn't bother, if I were you.