The battles, occurring every fifteen minutes or so, are brisk and bloody, but in them Northmen leaps too quickly from image to image, sometimes not giving us time to make sense of the mayhem. But the chases, and the Jacksonian sense of an epic journey across a time-lost landscape, will please devotees of the genre, and the flourishes are grand.

The cast is earnestly committed, and if there are a few too many hokey last-second rescues from certain doom, Northmen nevertheless rarely risks curdling into camp.

Northmen: A Viking Saga uses a relatively smaller scale to its advantage.

Lavishly staged and beautifully photographed, Northmen—A Viking Saga features enough energetic sword clanging to satisfy its target audience.

The fights are Old Hollywood meets New Bloodbath — corny and carnage-filled. The whole saga seems pre-ordained, pre-packaged and pretty boring, entirely too predictable to come off.