IF you can’t wait for the next series of Game Of Thrones, this cheap but cheerful swords and sandals saga might help fill a gap.
The plot concerns a family feud between a plucky Viking princess (Anna Demetriou) and her evil usurper uncle (Timo Nieminen) who has killed the king and framed her.
While she’s on the run, Odin (Terrence Stamp) keeps popping up in a swirl of CGI smoke to dispense nuggets of advice while a fearsome warrior, played by Will Mellor, provides more earthly assistance.
The dialogue is a little cheesy and the battle scenes short on extras but it’s reasonably exciting and it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
JUST how many more death-defying stunts does Tom Cruise have left in him?
If you saw that painful footage of the 56-year-old breaking his ankle on the set of this sixth Mission: Impossible movie, it might seem like retirement is beckoning for super-spy Ethan Hunt.
But it doesn’t take long for Cruise to answer his doubters.
In the first big sequence, he leaps out of a C-17 transport plane at 25,000ft, skydives through a lightning storm and lands on the glass roof of a Paris club.
Minutes later he is engaged in a bruising three-way fist fight with Superman star Henry Cavill and martial arts master Liang Yang.
The eye-popping action scenes begin to pile up. In Paris, Cruise hops on a motorbike to take part in one of the most stunning chases since The French Connection.
In London, we see him jump off the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral and make a series of death-defying (and in reality, ankle-breaking) rooftop leaps to reach the Tate Modern.
By the final reel he is hanging on to the landing gear of a helicopter among the snowy peaks of the Himalayas.
But it’s not just the action scenes that make this the blockbuster of the summer.
You don’t need to have seen previous instalment, Rogue Nation, to enjoy it, but fans should appreciate how director Christopher McQuarrie’s clever script forges little links with earlier instalments.
The face-switching masks return and are entrusted to Hunt’s comedy sidekick Benji (Simon Pegg).
And Michelle Monaghan’s Julia, who Hunt married in Mission: Impossible III, also makes a comeback.
A moral dilemma is at the heart of the plot. Ethan must decide whether to save old comrade Luther (Ving Rhames) or prevent nuclear material from getting into the hands of The Apostles, the terrorist group headed up by the previous film’s arch-criminal Solomon Lane (Sean Harris).
Ethan plumps for his old friend, leaving the world facing annihilation (again).
But my advice is to stop worrying about the plot and just enjoy the action.