Boudica: Queen of War (Jesse V. Johnson, 2023)

Just about the first thing that happens in Jesse V. Johnson’s low-fi epic  is that a bunch of Roman soldiers come across a praying band of Druids and slaughter every one of them in brutal detail. A close-up of an innocent belly being sliced open by a merciless soldier tells us exactly what kind of movie this is going to be, and then it just. . . stops being that kind of movie for the next forty minutes or so. Instead, Johnson takes pains to show us the idyllic normality of life under the Empire, at least for the family of the King of the Iceni, Prasutagus, devoted to peace with the Romans and submitting his state to them as a client kingdom. He lives in pastoral splendor with his beautiful wife and daughters, who are all clever and loving. Hints of the real world lie just outside: a vision of Christians rotting crucified on a country road, the danger of an overheard whisper that might disparage the Emperor (Nero at this time, circa 60 AD). A visit from the new Roman in charge, snide and, well, imperious, signals trouble ahead, as do closeups of the King’s sad-eyed second in command. And sure enough, soon the King is dead and the women in his family, disinherited by the Romans, are cruelly beaten, tortured, raped, and left for dead. Most of that we don’t see, but what we do witness is plenty to understand how a charming collaborationist wife and mother could suddenly find herself becoming Boudica, the legendary and long-prophesied warrior queen destined to lead the Britons to freedom. Or, failing that, at the least to kill a whole lot of Romans.

And so she does. After a couple of brief training sequences wherein Boudica proves that she has a magic sword (with an assist from some ghosts) and enlists the support of a band of experienced international mercenaries as well as the local Druids, she sets off to one victory after another, butchering soldiers and burning towns with relish. Colchester (Camulodunum), London (Londinium), and St. Albans (Verulamium) all fall to her band of painted and befurred Celts, before the Romans can finally organize a proper military response. In the meantime, Boudica’s victories cause the Romans at home to riot and burn the city down, inspire the mad Emperor to kill himself. Which isn’t actually what happened at all, Nero killed himself almost a decade later (even the fire was in 64), and the British revolt was only one of several that rocked his demented reign. Nor is it true, as far as I know, that Nero decreed that women couldn’t hold power or property (which in the film is the legal justification for disinheriting Prasutagus’s heirs), but this is a matter where something can be accurate without being true: Roman society was deeply patriarchal, much more so than the Celtic and Germanic nations on their periphery. So if one wants to adopt Boudica’s revolt as a stand for the rights of women, rather than merely a celebration of British nationalism, that seems reasonable. Similarly, if Johnson wants to fold aspects of Arthurian legend into Boudica’s story (at one point she has to dive into the water to retrieve her sword, becoming her own Lady of the Lake), I see no problem with that.

Jesse V. Johnson is one of the most accomplished indie action film directors working today, the man behind any number of straight to video classics starring the likes of Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, and Louis Mandylor I wrote about his Hell Hath No Fury here a couple of years ago, and that film has a lot in common with this one. Both are centered on a woman hero rather than a beefy Adkins-type. Both are set in the past, mostly in a forest. But where Hell is a small-scale story, set largely in one location which we learn in minute geographic detail in order to better understand and follow the intricately constructed action scenes that form the bulk of the movie, Boudica is Johnson trying something new, albeit with apparently the same limited resources he’s always had. The action scenes, because there are more of them in many different locations, are shorter, more impressionistic, but just as bloody. The emphasis is not on action for the sake of displaying the skill of the stunt performers or choreographers, but rather on the brutality of violence in the Classical period, and thus on the brutality of Empire itself. Boudica gives speeches about freedom, but she is never really interested in ruling or building a state. She’s on a mission to kill as many Romans as she can before they kill her, no more and no less.

Olga Kurylenko plays Boudica and it’s a striking performance if the only work of hers you’re familiar with before seeing this is Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, where she eats at Sonic, makes Ben Affleck sad, and twirls her gorgeous way through fields of sun-dappled wheat. That’s really the outlier in Kurylenko’s career, though. She’s spent most of the past decade making action movies, with parts in various sizes in everything from the Timothy Olyphant-starring proto-John Wick Hitman (2007) to this year’s Extraction 2. Here she’s equally at home in both halves of the film: memories of Malickian fields in the early scenes, battered and scarred and broken toothed in the action scenes, twirling through them like a ballerina with a magic sword. If Johnson is the low-budget version of a Paul WS Anderson or Luc Besson, then Kurylenko is the indie Milla Jovovich, and Boudica is her The Messenger. (I mean that as a compliment.)