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Movie review: “Mongol”

Marie Lascu,
Special to Grand Central Magazine

The film wants the viewer to marvel at Khan's strength as a survivor, or at the wonderful, unbreakable bond between him and his wife, writes Marie Lascu, but none of these things are executed with any personality. Photograph by Courtesy photo
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An “epic” film about Genghis Kahn should not bore a person to tears.

Mongol is shockingly uninteresting. Helmed by Russian Director and co-writer Sergei Bodrov, and starring the excellent Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano, Mongol seeks to chronicle Khan’s unexplored rise to power as emperor of the largest contiguous empire in history.

There is very little concrete historical information on record regarding the rise of Khan, and modern Mongols are pretty peeved at some of the historical inaccuracies.

But there is nothing new about filmmakers taking liberties with historical figures.

What Mongols should be mad about is the fact that a film about their most famous historical figure leaves no lasting impression.

The story is simple. It begins with Khan (real name: Temudjin) at nine years old, on a journey to choose a bride. His father intends for him to marry a woman from the tribe he stole his mother from in an effort to bring peace between them. (Seriously?)

Instead, Temudjin follows his heart. But as the years pass, he yearns for his bride. Of course, it won't be easy to get her back. Old enemies emerge, and fighting ensues. Temudjin must ally himself with a fellow Mongol to rescue his bride.

After a short battle, the alliance crumbles.

Outnumbered, Temudgjin and his warriors are either slaughtered or sold into slavery, and Temudgjin is imprisoned for a number of years.

And then without warning, the film cuts to a number of years later. Temudjin has united all the Mongols and brought law to a lawless land.

Basically, they skipped over his actual rise to power.

The film wants the viewer to marvel at his strength as a survivor, or at the wonderful, unbreakable bond between him and his wife. But none of these things are executed with any personality.

However, the film did have a lot going for it, production-wise. The on-location shooting in Mongolia made for exquisite landscapes. The set design is detailed and realistic, as are the costumes.

But this great attention to detail is wasted. The dialogue is lifeless; it’s as if they watched a bunch of Hollywood epics and jotted down every line they had in common and pasted them into a script. I was constantly thinking of Braveheart throughout the film, and would venture to guess that Bodrov watched that film more than a few times.

Unlike Mel Gibson, who also took great liberties with his historical hero, Bodrov forgot to inject real energy into the story. The events depicted are either mundane or incredibly cliché. And the most significant events that would qualify as a “rise to power” are skipped over in order to focus on drawn-out events from Temudgjin's childhood.

Certainly the death of one’s father and subsequent alienation are relevant, but these things don’t give him actual power as a Khan. He gains power when he decides it’s time to unite all of Mongolia.

Show me how he does that, because it is from that point onward that he wipes out an entire civilization and proceeds to amass the largest land empire in recorded history. These small facts are given to us in a little paragraph at the end of the film.

Considering the lack of factual information, the filmmakers wasted an opportunity to be really creative in telling the story of one of the world’s greatest conquerors. The film was made far away from Hollywood, but has Tinseltown conventionalities smeared all over it. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure has a more compelling version of Genghis Kahn than Mongol does.

What makes it even more disappointing is the fact that they cast an excellent actor in the role of Khan; what could've been a brilliant biopic is reduced to a less-than-average depiction of the life of one of the world's greatest conquerors.

OVERALL GRADE: C-