In Red Sonja (2025), a variety of character actors chew scenery, look super hot, and swing swords at each other. Sonja is a feral horse girl who thinks class traitors should be beaten to death by Cyclops. She is better at bouldering than your college boyfriend.
If this were one of the seven DVDs I had in 2003, it would be my favorite movie. I would have pulled it out of the bargain bin at Walmart by lowering myself into it waist-deep, and selected it exclusively because it has a hot woman with a sword on the cover, only to be surprised I actually liked it.
I would have terrorized my siblings by making cardboard swords and hunting them around the house.
This movie doesn’t have the budget to be anything except what it is: the meat-and-potatoes of fantasy genre that we don’t get nearly enough of anymore. We used to have Dragonheart! We had Mists of Avalon! Then we started getting a lot of dispassionate high-budget money laundering blockbusters. Every fun fantasy concept was stretched out into TV shows that Netflix cancelled after two seasons.
Not Red Sonja. This movie is the chosen one, like Dungeons and Dragons, meant to reunite massive fantasy nerds with other fantasy nerds who deeply care about the genre and will watch it without caring if the armor is made out of PVC.
Is it great? I mean, no, probably not, but nor is it bad outside the limitations of a lower budget movie. The extremely solid story only ever sags in the penultimate act, and there is one cut between scenes that confused me, but literally those are my two entire complaints about Red Sonja.
Its heart is in the right place.
I could entertain myself by watching this in constant rotation with my other six DVDs for years, getting encyclopedic knowledge of the flick, memorizing the lines, and devoting myself to the scary white sword lady.
If you liked those kinds of movies, you’ll like this, and you should watch it. Set your expectations appropriately. Don’t take it too seriously. Have a great time.
(image credit: Samuel Goldwyn Films)
