There’s an odd thrill in seeing forgotten pulp bubble up from the mire of pop culture, a kind of skeleton dance we’re expected to mistake for heroics. The trouble with Red Sonja—this latest, long-gestating costume pageant from the American sword-and-sorcery pipeline—is that it wants so badly to be a rejuvenation of pulp and myth, but in its fever for legitimacy, it strips itself of delirium and ends up faintly apologetic, as if mumbling a prayer to Robert E. Howard while clutching a copy of Boring Blockbusters for Dummies.
The plot is the usual splay of trauma-begets-vengeance. Hyrkania is invaded; Sonja suffers; years flit by like an afterthought. The best this 2025 update can claim is an origin story polished up and sanded down for female empowerment, but what does empowerment mean when the film’s ambitions never rise above competent cosplay?
Let’s start with Matilda Lutz, who brings a glimmer of humanity to Sonja—a feat that deserves credit, given the script’s stubborn refusal to inject wit or dimension into its lead. There’s a flintiness in her eyes that hints at the inner tumult the writers never quite allow her to express. Lutz moves with the wary purpose of a real fighter, but her stature—barely taller than her comic-book sword—calls to mind those odd moments in Hollywood when “larger than life” is translated as “good enough for television.” I liked her in Revenge—fierce, resourceful. Here, marooned in a morass of underlit sets and stupefying dialogue, she’s adrift, and there’s only so much conviction she can summon when all around her is so artlessly flattened.
The filmmakers seem intent on ticking every modern box: environmental anxieties, sisterhood, trauma processed as spectacle. In theory, these could give Sonja stature and meaning missing from her brawny, cheesecake forebears. What we get are themes signposted with the subtlety of a boulder. At least the chainmail bikini, now repositioned as a symbol to be reclaimed, has been kept with a knowing wink—if only the film showed more appetite for fun elsewhere.
This ought to be a feast of pulp villains. Instead, we have Robert Sheehan, who seems bottled up and muted, either shackled by the tepid script or simply bored, and a line-up of antagonists that are dramatic purely by fiat, because we are told they're threatening rather than shown. Did the director forget Rhona Mitra, cast her for her jawline, and promptly lose her in the shuffle? The movie parades her with no intent to capitalize on her—no action, no verve, just more potential leaking away.
The side characters march in and out like extras auditioning for a more interesting film. Annisia, Dragan, the cyclops, the horse (whose canine antics are telegraphed with such Disneyfied bafflement that you might expect it to start singing)—all are presented, then dropped, each development as weightless as a rack of props in a rental warehouse.
Sword and sorcery, for all their hackneyed rhythms, are supposed to sweep us up and away. Here, the sweep never quite arrives. The monstrous war engines and fantastical creatures make an entrance, do their allotted shuffling, then vanish, never to rouse the temperature again. The “epic” in this supposed epic amounts to the odd passable set-piece, but the choreography is cut short, fights edited down to their bloodless, inconclusive quick-cuts. Dull, slack, uninspired: these are the watchwords. When the climactic “run from the fire in slo-mo” moment provokes groans, you realize we’re closer to Syfy Channel dreck than cinematic spectacle.
The digital effects are the sort of embarrassment you apologize for to out-of-town relatives: television shows have trained us to expect more, and all the blue-lit forests in Bulgaria can’t hide a production that screams, “We just couldn’t afford any better.” The costume—yes, it’s pleasingly faithful. The score? The only element with pulse, courtesy of Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli, whose music might make you believe, if only for a minute, that there’s real mythos under the paper-mache world-building.
What is a fantasy film, now? At its best, it’s poetry for barbarians and exiles; at its worst, it’s fan service and nostalgia masquerading as artistry. Red Sonja occupies an awkward limbo—too earnest to embrace pulp, too generic to stand as true myth. It treats its world with laborious seriousness, but that seriousness becomes a leaden anchor. Why hint at Conan yet never say the name? Why parade monsters at the beginning only to ask them to leave the stage before intermission? There’s a certain shamefaced quality to the production, as if the filmmakers themselves have been tasked with an assignment they cannot wait to finish.
And what of that ending—sequel bait so limp and directionless that it almost counts as an act of mercy when the credits roll? No dream, no wildness, no conclusion, just an ellipsis. A punchline without a joke.
I’m almost sympathetic to the aimless circus that is the Red Sonja movie project. There's potential in this character—a possibility the filmmakers sense, even as they fumble it. But Red Sonja is at best a marginal improvement over the 1985 disaster, doomed, as ever, by a script that can't rise above serviceable and direction that, like its horse, merely follows commands without conviction or sense. In a landscape where every other Netflix show delivers more style and adventure on a tighter budget, you wonder: is this really what the mighty Hyrkanians fought for?
Red Sonja is, in the end, a bad movie—just not as atrocious as its ancestor. In a better world, she’d ride again in a story as wild and bloody and strange as her legend deserves. Here, she’s another would-be legend stuck in a film with all the epic stature of a convention cosplay contest. A sword-and-sorcery movie with neither sword nor sorcery in its cinema, merely the echo of what could have been.
