Red Sonja

The sheer tenacity of the Red Sonja property is enough to make any seasoned cinephile tilt their head in respect. After decades of circling the drain of development hell—trading directors like playing cards and watching various stars attach and detach themselves like nervous barnacles—the She-Devil with a Sword finally slashed her way back onto the screen in 2025. Yet, despite the character’s high-profile legacy in the pages of Marvel and Dynamite Comics, this iteration arrived with the quiet thud of a muffled dagger. It’s a strange beast of contemporary cinema: a film that feels like a $40 million secret, existing in that weird limbo between a "theatrical event" and something you discover while scrolling past three pages of true crime documentaries on a streaming app.

I watched this on a Tuesday night while trying to peel a very stubborn sticker off the bottom of a new frying pan, and the rhythmic scraping of my fingernail actually synced up weirdly well with the metallic clanging of the opening skirmish.

The Ghost of 1985 and the Long Road Back

For those of us who grew up with the 1985 version, the image of Brigitte Nielsen’s mullet and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bewildered cameo is burned into our retinas. That film was a campy, neon-lit artifact of its era. This 2025 version, directed by MJ Bassett (Solomon Kane, Silent Hill: Revelation), attempts to strip away the spandex-and-hairspray aesthetic in favor of something more tactile and grim. Matilda Lutz—who proved she could handle visceral, bloody retribution in the 2017 thriller Revenge—takes up the mantle here, and she is easily the best thing about the movie.

Lutz brings a lean, wolf-like intensity to Sonja that feels appropriate for our current "post-hero" landscape. She doesn't look like she spent the morning at a hair salon; she looks like she’s been sleeping in the dirt and eating roasted lizard. The film effectively updates the character’s origin, focusing on the trauma of her past without making it feel like a "check-the-box" exercise in modern grit. However, there’s a distinct feeling that the movie is fighting against a budget that wanted to be twice as big as it actually was, leading to some sequences that feel claustrophobic when they should feel epic.

The Magnificent Sheehan and the Box Office Void

In an era where every mid-tier IP is expected to launch a multi-platform universe, Red Sonja’s box office performance—a literal pittance of $271,461—is a fascinating case study in marketing failure. It’s a "forgotten" film that was released only months ago. Part of this stems from the franchise saturation we’re all feeling; if it’s not Marvel or Dune, audiences are increasingly hesitant to leave the couch. It’s a shame, because Robert Sheehan (The Umbrella Academy, Misfits) delivers a performance as Emperor Dragan the Magnificent that is pure, unadulterated scenery-chewing.

Robert Sheehan plays the villain with a flamboyant, twitchy energy that feels like he’s in a completely different, much weirder movie, and honestly, I wanted to follow him there. His chemistry with Wallis Day’s Annisia provides the film with its only real moments of campy levity. On the physical front, the casting of heavy hitters like Michael Bisping and Martyn Ford ensures that the muscle feels "real." When these guys hit people, it doesn’t look like stuntmen waiting for a cue; it looks like a collision between two freight trains filled with protein powder.

Crunchy Steel and Virtual Horizons

MJ Bassett has always been a director who punches above her weight class when it comes to practical action. The swordplay here avoids the "shredded wheat" editing style where you can't tell who is stabbing whom. Instead, the choreography is clear and rhythmic. There’s a particular sequence in a forest clearing where Sonja takes on a group of mercenaries that feels remarkably old-school—long takes, wide shots, and plenty of "crunchy" foley work.

The film also dabbles in the "Volume" technology (virtual production) that has become the hallmark of contemporary fantasy, but the seams show. Some of the digital vistas look a bit too much like a high-end video game loading screen, which pulls you out of the mud-and-blood atmosphere the actors are working so hard to establish. It’s a recurring issue in 2020s cinema: the democratization of CGI means we get "epic" scale for cheap, but we lose the soul of a real location. Still, the trivia hounds might appreciate knowing that the production moved through various European locales to find that specific "Hyborian Age" gloom, a nod to the practical roots of the genre.

Red Sonja is a movie that deserved a louder life than it got. It isn't a masterpiece of high fantasy, but it’s a sincere, gritty actioner that treats its source material with more respect than the 1985 version ever did. If you can track it down on the digital fringes, it provides a solid ninety minutes of escapism fueled by Matilda Lutz's charisma and some genuinely gnarly stunt work. It serves as a reminder that even in the age of franchise fatigue, there's still room for a woman with a sword to ruin a tyrant's afternoon.