It’s almost possible to feel affection for this dud of a film. Almost.

RED SONJA ★½
(MA15+) 110 minutes

Do the times call for a lady Braveheart? I’m not sure they do, but that’s roughly what we’re getting in M.J. Bassett’s underpowered Red Sonja, the latest reimagining of a character originally conceived in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian.

Red Sonja.Credit: Via Rialto

In the 1970s, Sonja showed up in Marvel comic books as an archetypal sword-wielding maiden in a chain mail bikini, a portrayal that formed the basis for the 1985 movie where she was played by Brigitte Nielsen, which disappointed many who were lured into expecting a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This new Red Sonja doesn’t have much to do with the earlier movie, nor with Marvel, who lost the rights to the character in the 1990s – and as a kind of ecofeminist parable, it also probably wouldn’t have won the approval of the famously reactionary and bigoted Howard.

We’re in a mystical age of heroes, at the dawn of time. Sabre-toothed tigers and prehistoric rhinoceroses roam an ambiguously-located forest, as does the intrepid Sonja (Italian star Matilda Lutz), living off wild honey and paying obeisance to the mother goddess as she searches for her lost tribe.

Before she can catch up with them, she’s taken captive and forced to become a gladiator at the mercy of the wicked Dragan the Magnificent (Robert Sheehan), who fancies himself as both a future world emperor and a scientific genius, though his inventions aren’t strictly his own.

Robert Sheehan appears to be sampling bits of all his favourite screen baddies.Credit: Via Rialto

In an era when fantasy blockbusters tend to be either relentlessly flip or lumberingly pretentious, it’s almost possible to feel affection for the straightforward B-grade badness of Red Sonja, a movie where a line like “the fate of the world is in your hands” can be uttered with absolutely no irony.

Almost, but not quite. The CGI-reliant action is unimpressive (the scene where Sonja and her new allies escape captivity is cut short as if money had run out). Lutz does a lot of scowling and baring her teeth, and has a way of making the dialogue of screenwriter Tasha Huo sound even more stilted than it is.

That leaves nearly all the acting to be done by Sheehan, whose initial deceptive mildness is intended to give himself a running start. By halfway through, he appears to be sampling bits of all his favourite screen baddies, from Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham to Ralph Fiennes’ sadistic Nazi in Schindler’s List.

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Truth be told, there’s nothing here that wasn’t done at least a hundred times better in George Miller’s Furiosa, which is similarly plotted in some respects, especially the way the underdog heroine and the braggadocious villain turn out to be each other’s destiny.

This is not to say there’s anything resembling romantic tension between them, or that Sonja is a substantial enough character for any of her relationships to come to life. She does have a handsome prince who admires her from afar – but as with a clean-living cowboy in an old Western, her greatest love is for her horse.

Red Sonja is in cinemas from today, and available on streaming platforms from September 3.

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