The Ash Lad: In the Hall of the Mountain King

❤️

Ash Lad is an inoffensive, comical take on old Nordic fairytales involving princesses, noble quests and mountain trolls. That's about it. Other reviewers on these pages comparing it favourably to The Lord of the Rings chapters are just trolling themselves and being frankly ridiculous in the process. A much better comparison is with The Princess Bride. Neither film takes itself too seriously, but Ash Lad lacks the witty script, the interesting sub-plots and the romantic chemistry between the Princess and her would-be-commoner rescuer of The Princess Bride. What it does do which is somewhat different from the regular tropes featuring in this genre, is to have a hero, who's not that heroic and not even the sharpest tool in the shed. But he is a punter with a long-term goal, who is ready and willing to play the long game to achieve his quest, aided and abetted by his even thicker two brothers. Up against them, besides the natural and supernatural obstacles is a quartet of bumbling, stumbling villains, whose leader, Prince Frederic, gets most of the good lines. Judged from other reviews on this page, I must have been lucky seeing an English sub-titled version of the film, as the dubbed version doesn't seem to win universal acclaim. The production looks quite good and makes great use of some spectacular location scenery, but don't expect any groundbreaking special effects in the CGI department. Again like the PB, Ash Lad is generally content to use miniatures, clever photographic angles, costumed capers and puppetry to achieve its supernatural content. The acting is sound, without being stand out and I think the production team erred a little in only having limited interactions between Princess Kristin and Esben. The script didn't really give them enough time to build up a believable rapport, before they were separated until well into the third act of the movie. It also just needed to be a little more cleverer with the dialogue which is frequently run of the mill, to be kind. A few more wickedly sexy lines like Kristen's last line in the movie regarding enjoying riding with her, would have gone down a treat with adult viewers of what is ultimately, not a lot more than a kids' film.

This is a very old fashioned fairy tale that has been banned for at least half a century, and probably an entire century, by the powers of Hollywood. The censors didn't get to this one. It doesn't have the Hollywood formula of the usual hatefulness. This was written with love and wit. It's very reminiscent of the better parts of Anderson and Grimm, without the Grimm racism. It's very funny, and very entertaining, and thus hated by the Beavis and Butthead crowd that so often come here in this present age. Perhaps the day will come when that sort of hatefulness will be a minority instead of popular opinion. This is how to make a film for the "non control freaks".

I started watching this film assuming I'd move on to something else but was drawn in by the beautiful and unusual scenery (I'm not familiar with the landscape of Norway). The storyline wasn't especially original but contained enough elements of the "modern fantasy film" and a traditional fairy tale to be interesting. Modern elements included anachronistic dialogue and injections of somewhat juvenile humor. The traditional fairy tale elements included episodic encounters with supernatural beings and a series of seemingly useless items picked up by the main character that later come in handy. (There was one item I'd totally forgotten about until came into play at the end of the film in an important way.) I also liked how the brothers ended up working together to accomplish their mission and learned to see their seeming incompetent brother in a different light. The film isn't perfect of course. Some of the dialogue seemed a bit clunky (but I was watching a dubbed version....I have a feeling the dialogue worked better in Norwegian.) The special effects are not bad (though not as slick as some American films) and don't distract. Overall, enjoyable.