Ever since Brigitte Nielsen unlaced her battle corset after shooting ended on pulpy fantasy actioner Red Sonja back in the 1980s, there’s been talk of sequels and/or reboots. Truffle around the internet and you’ll find a saga to rival the finest in Old Norse about deals signed and projects greenlit and then abandoned over the years, with names attached to direct ranging from X-Men’s Bryan Singer to Transparent’s Joey Soloway. What a shame Soloway’s version never got off the ground because that surely would have been a hoot, and probably more interesting than this soggy, CGI-infused, low-budget confection that’s finally arrived.
Little-known actor Matilda Lutz gets the lead role this time around, as well as getting all the hair extensions in the auburn aisle. She presents a Sonja that’s more a pixie-like hippy chick than Nielsen’s Valkyrie heroine, a bit of a loner who mostly kicks around the forest with her beloved horse. Sonja finds herself sucked, at first unenthusiastically, into camaraderie after she is captured by evil emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan, clearly enjoying himself) and compelled to fight in gladiatorial combats. Sometimes her opponents are the other prisoners, and sometimes they are gargantuan amalgamations of pixels and VFX fairy dust, including a grumpy cyclops roughly the size of a tower block who is controlled by Draygan with what looks like a magic torch. Wallis Day plays another antagonist with bleached eyebrows and agonising visions of all the people she’s ever killed, just to show that baddies have backstories too.
Indeed, there’s quite a lot of backstorying going on here, with lashings of flashbacks as we find out how Sonja came to be a lonely child of the forest, how other characters got roped into all this, and even what makes Draygan so mean. The action sequences, which are what made the original Sonja so indelible (especially since Nielsen had Arnold Schwarzenegger as a co-star), are a bit more rote. But someone somewhere must have done a punch-up on the script, because every now and then a reasonably witty quip arrives out of nowhere before the dialogue reverts to faux medieval speak.
• Red Sonja is on digital platforms from 18 August, and on DVD & Blu-ray from 8 September
