by Verena Kyratzes

James Purefoy is one of the most talented and at the same time underrated actors of his generation. If you’ve ever seen the disaster that is A Knight’s Tale, you’ll know what I mean. A lot of actors bled for that movie, and only he manages to shine.

I’ve been watching both his career and his movies ever since, and with the short, beautiful exception of playing Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome, the world’s casting agents haven’t been very kind to him. Resident Evil. George And The Dragon. Vanity Fair. He didn’t get Bond and the two TV shows that he was involved with either didn’t even go into production (The Saint) or got cancelled after one season (The Philanthropist). So all in all things didn’t look good for him at the closing of the first decade of the new millennium.

Then along came Solomon Kane. It sounded good, I’ll admit that. James Purefoy as Robert E. Howard’s puritan superhero. Okay, that sentence contains the word puritan and I don’t think that goes very well with superhero. Still, the initial reviews from France, Spain and the UK sounded good and I hoped, oh how I hoped, that Purefoy would for once star in a good movie, one with franchise hopes. But it was not to be.

(Warning: extensive spoilers for a bad movie!)

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