Condottieri: A History Lesson You Can Feel Getting Weird

Is it worth a watch?

Honestly, only if you are a massive fan of historical oddities or you just really love watching guys in Renaissance armor standing around in open fields. If you want a fun adventure, skip it. If you want to see how cinema was used as a heavy-handed tool in 1930s Italy, well, you are in for a treat.

Luis Trenker plays Giovanni, and he spends a lot of time looking intense while pointing at maps. There is a weight to the film, but not the kind that feels like good storytelling. It feels like the weight of a giant monument someone forgot to dust.

The whole thing is built around this idea of unification through brute force and iron-clad loyalty. You can tell they were trying to mirror the vibe of the political climate at the time. Sometimes it works, but mostly it just makes the characters feel like cardboard cutouts standing in front of painted backgrounds.

There is this one scene where they are training in the mud. The mud looks very real—like, the kind of mud that ruins your boots for a week. But the men marching? They move with this weird, robotic synchronization that makes you feel like you are watching a drill, not a group of guys who have been fighting in the woods.

I found myself comparing it to the pacing in Un Carnet de bal, which feels like a total breeze compared to this. Condottieri likes to sit on its own thoughts for way too long. It stops, it stares at the camera, and it expects you to be impressed by its own sense of importance.

• The armor looks surprisingly heavy. You can practically hear the clanking in your sleep.
• Some of the extras in the background look like they are just waiting for their lunch break to start.
• The dialogue is stiff enough to break a tooth on.
• There is a distinct lack of humor. I guess unifying Italy is serious business?

I don't know, maybe I'm being too harsh. It’s not a bad movie, it’s just a very preachy one. It reminds me of the way some of the older films like Hard Boiled had a bit more grit to them, whereas this is polished and scrubbed clean of any real human messiness.

It’s all very grand. It’s all very loud. But by the time the credits rolled, I felt like I had just finished a very long, very dry lecture. Still, for a movie from that era, the sheer scale of the thing is kind of impressive, even if I didn't care about a single person on screen. 🤷‍♂️