Poor ol’ Colin Firth.  To think that the one time heart-throb of the Jane Austen crowd has been reduced to making a truly awful Estrogen Channel-bait Roman epic is just……sad.

I refer to The Last Legion, on which I wasted a couple of perfectly good hours last evening.  The plot revolves around the rayther startling proposition that King Arthur was the son of Romulus Augustulus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.  Historickally, Romulus, who was just a boy at the time, was expelled from his throne by the Goth king Odoacer in 476 A.D., the last of a feeble line of Emperors who had been under the de facto sway of the Goths more or less since Alaric’s sacking of Rome in 410 A.D.  In the moovie, Romulus is rescued from the Goths by Firth’s character – the head of the Imperial Guard – and spirited away to Britannia, there to find what was left of the 9th Legion (the “Last” Legion) and make a stand against the following Goths and a baaad-ass local warlord apparently named after the legendary Vortigern.  (Whoever wrote the story didn’t pay much attention – Vortigern is remembered as the Briton who first invited the Saxons to come across and take up permanent residence and is thus roundly condemned as a boob, not a meanie.)  The sword Excalibur, here originally made for Julius Caesar, is picked up by the Boy Emperor in his flight and carried along, eventually to be stuck in the ground by Romulus after the climactic fight because “all he wants is peace.”  (And we all know how well that worked out.)

Coupled to this mangling of history are sub-plots about a burgeoning relationship between Firth and Aishwarya Rai who plays Mira, a Xena-ish hotty from the Eastern Empire; double-dealings of the Goths, the Roman Senate and Constantinople; Merlin (played by Ben Kingsley, who I guess needed the money) and some mystical pact or other to protect Excalibur; and the faith of Firth’s plucky band of veterans who trudge all the way from Rome to Hadrian’s Wall with him (but without packs or other visible means of support).  Oh, and there’s a lot of stilted dialog about love and truth and honor ‘n stuff.

I only tossed this flick into the Netflix queue to begin with because I like stories about the historickal Arthur and his apparent Roman roots.  But this dog was just too silly to take at all seriously.  And as for Firth, well, he looked more like an extra from Life of Brian than anything else.