Mongol

They say that Russia is in the ascendant again, flush with oil money and billion pound football teams. Next week sees the release of Timur Bekmambetov's first Hollywood film, Wanted, with Angelina Jolie. Bekmambetov is a Kazak, but his international hits Night Watch and Day Watch are as Russian as Vladimir Putin.

Mongol, directed by Sergei Bodrov, is a German-Russian-Kazak coproduction, and as the title suggests, it's a Mongolian story. But the confidence and epic scale of the filmmaking make you wonder why Bekmambetov would bother to go Hollywood.

Mongol is the story of the man we know as Genghis Khan. I once had a neighbour who named his son Genghis, a choice that caused more than a few raise eyebrows in our neck of the woods. Whether it was in honour of the twelfth century leader I never plucked up courage to ask, but after seeing Bodrov's movie it doesn't seem so unthinkable.

This is the first part of a planned trilogy, taking Temudgin (his birth name) from the age of nine ' when his father, the khan of a small clan, was poisoned by rivals and usurped by men who had been his followers. Temudgin himself is only saved from the knife by virtue of the enlightened Mongol tradition that children may not be murdered. Mind, as soon as he's as tall as a cart wheel he's facing the chop.

Temudgin's early life is a history of close brushes with mortality, perilous independence, captivity and escape. Somehow, against the odds, he survives. Not only that, he emerges as a proud, strong and ruthless man, unfaltering in his sense of his own destiny.

Played by the acclaimed Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu (Zatoichi; Last Life in the Universe), Temudgin is less the vile tyrant we're familiar with than a noble soul, a romantic even, albeit hardened by his suffering. Course, he's a tough cookie, but also a brave warrior and an inspired tactician.

Freed from time constraints (at this rate, the trilogy will extend to about seven hours), Bodrov doesn't seem to have condensed much. I lost count of the number of times Temudgin is chased down by horsemen across the steppes (do they have a tracking device hidden in his fur boots?). He's threatened with execution so often you can see how he would begin to believe in his immortality. For a bloodthirsty crowd the Mongols are reticent to do the deed.

If it's repetitive, the movie isn't boring. It looks breathtaking (of the two credited cinematographers, Rogier Stoffers is known for Disturbia, and Sergei Trofimov for Night Watch).

The Mongolian locations are so expansive and so empty; you think this must have been what the Wild West must have looked like before the white men came. The anthropological detail is fascinating. The armies of extras seem to go on forever, and not in that cloned CGI sense you get in American epics these days ' somehow you can tell that these are real, living, breathing people enacting the clash of clans and civilizations'

I'm not sure yet that Bodrov (best known here for Prisoner Of The Mountains) have invested the story with the nuance and complexity to match its thrilling kinetic quality and stirring scope, but it's an immersive history lesson for sure. If you liked Gladiator, Spartacus or Kurosawa's samurai epics you should get a load of Mongol.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com