Terrific action spectacle and a great tattered and beaten performance from Paul Giamatti, but the film is largely lifeless and dull.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jan 29, 2012

Most of the movie is so bland and has such a lack of passion for characters or story that it makes you wonder why anyone cared enough to make it.

| Original Score: 5.2/10 | Jul 22, 2011

James Purefoy's Marshal is still bound by his Templar oaths, but will he be able to preserve his vow of chastity when Kate Mara's lady of the castle starts fondling his great big Templar sword?

| Jul 18, 2011

What saves the flick is Paul Giamatti's John, played as a petulant, damaged man born in a world where he wields the power of a god and inevitably rages as that power is snatched away.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 14, 2011

Good gravy, if you're looking for satisfyingly bloody swordplay, look no further.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 11, 2011

Ironclad is as weighed-down as it sounds.

| Original Score: C- | Jul 8, 2011

Like Takashii Miike's 13 Assassins, Ironclad takes a familiar genre-the historical action picture-and colors it blood-red.

| Jul 8, 2011

Casting is almost uniformly first rate with Cox, Purefoy and the always brilliant Giamatti providing noteworthy standouts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 8, 2011

As a critic who complains about painless and brainless action movies, I hoist a glass of mead to the men and maidens of "Ironclad."

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 8, 2011

The loud, closely photographed limb-hacking becomes as monotonous as the movie's unrelentingly gray palette.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 8, 2011

A gore-filled guilty pleasure...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 8, 2011

A certain bloody matinee charm to it, if your idea of charm is brutally graphic combat scenes and well-known faces hamming it up in the downtime between.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 7, 2011

The core fan base of this English sword battle drama will pay for the boundary-pushing blood and gore. Why bore them with things like plot and context and production values?

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 7, 2011

The action is cluttered and the story overly compressed, with a lot of yammering about who's aligned with whom and why (no wonder Mr. Giamatti's eyes keep rolling) in between the geysers of red.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 7, 2011

Through it all, Paul Giamatti spits bilious fury as a ruthless king with a mile-wide mean streak and an army of Danish mercenaries. What's not to like?

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 7, 2011

As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 7, 2011

Purefoy is as bleakly gorgeous as the film around him... With scads of bloody action and a boot in the ass to the notion of the divine right of kings, this is flick to hit you both in the gut and in the head.

| Jul 7, 2011

Fetishizes the various ways in which men can be skewered by medieval weaponry

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 7, 2011

It's overlong, but Ironclad provides a righteous jolt, working as a gritty work of period recreation and as a sword-swinging marathon of squirting blood and flying severed limbs.

| Original Score: B | Jul 7, 2011

Unfortunately, a narrative needs characters as well as plot, and that's where Ironclad falls off its horse.

| Original Score: C+ | Jul 7, 2011