The fantasy works of Robert E. Howard (Conan), often short stories of supernatural horror, are the best there is but they so often won’t work in film. Director Michael J. Bassett’s (Deathwatch) Solomon Kane succeeds as a straightforward adventure tale for the PG-13 crowd and not of the superlative Howard. Simply put, Howard’s work is R- rated Tolkien, or rather should be. So if you’re going to try and introduce Solomon Kane to the world, as the director is admirably trying to do, it had better be the sexiest, darkest, most poetic fantasy. Still, this is an origins story here that is somewhat forced introducing the 17^th century Englishman to wide audiences, rather than one based freely on any Howard tale

Kane fights against evil but after surviving an encounter with the Reaper on a fortress attack somewhere in North Africa in the year 1600, he vows peace seeking redemption by retreating to a monastery back in England, even giving his riches to the church. The priests feel rather through prophecy that Kane does not really belong with them (no kidding!) and he is sent away to fulfill his destiny, they concede a violent one. Kane wanders the starving, warring countryside plagued by a witch and her army of Spawn-like henchmen until he befriends a traveling Puritan family. He has flashbacks and we learn that he had a falling out with his father over his not wanting to enter the church as a career choice; he is banished losing all inheritance but not before accidentally pushing his nasty older brother off a cliff. After the pilgrim family is attacked and the daughter Meredith (Rachel Hurd-Wood) is taken prisoner as a slave, he drops his oath, and a man of his word, sets out to save her.

Sets and locations are quite beautiful as Bassett felt it important to use real landscapes but they are underexploited by the camera and not really a match for the dream worlds of Kane; something that did work with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, it is almost too material. Kane is a world of its own and it needs to be filmed as a true fantasy thick with vultures and writhing in serpents. Like Excalibur and Legend, or as derived from comics such as Frank Miller’s 300.

To be honest, I’m not sure if casting James Purefoy as Kane is an imposing enough character despite his slightly Van Helsing-ish Hugh Jackman looks. The screen does light up with other characters such as the Puritan father William (Pete Postlethwaite) and Kane’s father Josiah Kane (Max von Sydow). If there’s one thing Howard stories do not have it is humour, so I wonder at the casting of Mackenzie Crook (The Office, UK version) to play the role of a priest. The score is good as you might expect from Klaus Badelt. Just think of the Scorpion King and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Fight scenes are good and liven up the audience with the first splatters of blood and beheadings. On its own it is an entertaining adventure, it is just that maybe everything pulled out of the classics and comics does not all have to be made into a movie, and can’t be. Well, maybe next time Kane can pick up his fetish stave, head off to Africa, and we can really get down to business.