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Fear not, The Mouse is rescued by Roy Batty - I mean, a Mysterious Cowled Stranger who travels on a powerful black horse, is armed with a crossbow and carries a big ass hawk around on his arm. To the pulsing beat of a four piece drum kit and the finest Casio consumer keyboard available at the time, the two make their getaway. A short time later, Gaston observes some strange behavior in the vicinity of his new friend, and becomes suspicious that this dark savior is more than meets the eye. Their escape enrages the Bishop, who has a history with the Cowled Stranger (whom he calls “Navarre”) and his hawk. The Bishop assigns Marquet (Ken Hutchison), his finest man, to the case - one of the last times you see Marquet in the whole film.

That makes sense.

Anyway, Navarre informs Gaston that he is on a holy quest to kill the Bishop. And he feels that Gaston, as the only man to have escaped from the prison at Aquila, is the perfect person to help. It takes some convincing, but the two medieval warriors and their '80s hair cuts, French names and vaguely British accents and their hawk set off to do the deed. You can see where this is going, can’t you? If two men are on a mission from God and are on opposing sides of the same goal, someone is going down. HARD. And the loser is probably going to die a heinous, lingering fantasy movie style death. I’m not saying this is what happens. I’m just...saying.

As Navarre and Gaston learn about each other, they discover that they need one another to solve their respective problems. Gaston finds out Navarre’s Terrible Secret, which involves a ghastly love triangle between him, the Bishop and a lovely damsel named Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer). Which reminds me, this is a fantasy flick, right? So there’s a damsel in distress, naturally. There’s an eccentric wizard, of course. There’s an effete villain with a moustache twirling henchman. There’s a bunch of internal conflict about honor, dead fathers, love, God, death, revenge, blah, blah, blah. This is normal. What is not normal is the glacial pacing of this film.

There is an interminably sluggish but dramatically improved second act which discloses a curse that afflicts Navarre and Isabeau, and explains the title of the film. The bishop has cursed them so that by day Isabeau will take the form of a Hawk and by night, Navarre a wolf. They travel side by side but can never truly be together except while one of them is in animal form. This discovery is anticlimactic, since it’s pretty obvious early on what has happened to the two. Not to mention, you can’t very well have a fantasy flick without a mystical prognostication of some kind. It simply isn’t done. There is a way to break the curse, but they have to do this and do that, and be here at a certain time, and Navarre doesn’t believe the Prophecy because he’s never seen a movie before and doesn’t realize that you ALWAYS believe the Prophecy....

Sorry. I almost fell asleep. Prophecies bore the crap out of me. Where was I?

Oh, yes. The problem is not just that the Prophecy is anticlimactic, but the whole damn film is, as well. Not to mention predictable. And, as soft and shapeless as a half baked loaf of bread. The fundamental narrative has the potential to be a very tragic and beautiful story. Star crossed lovers kept apart by the curse of a superfluously evil villain is a story as old as the sky, and it shouldn’t be that hard to tell because it’s been done about 50 million times before. But here, it comes across as largely witless camp. How do you screw up a story that you can ruthlessly plagiarize with absolutely no legal repercussions whatsoever?

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