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BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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This bio-pic drops into every pitfall the form offers. Pretending to immerse us in the Europe of the early 1500s, the film fails to evoke a world that’s believable or surprising, so intent are director Eric Till and writers Camille Thomasson and Bart Gavigan on propping up the various straw men, symbols, and clichés they think they need to tell Luther’s story. Joseph Fiennes plays Martin early on as a cloddish naïf, just to reassure audiences that they won’t be spending two hours with some kind of intellectual; when he must appear as a scholar and teacher, he turns into a stand-up comic. Now and then Luther wrestles alone with his demons, in scenes intended to show that he has a dark side, though not dark enough to endanger anyone but himself. The style of the film is encapsulated in the slow track-in on our hero as he refuses to recant his writings before the Inquisition. This hackneyed underlining proves that Till has no faith in his actor or his material. Peter Ustinov’s performance as Prince Frederick of Saxony is squirted into the film in little blots of disapproval and consternation. At the Columbus (115 minutes).
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