I have never seen the movie that you are referring to so I don't know how bad of an adaptation it was. I normally assume all movie adaptations are bad; therefore, if one is good, I'm pleasantly surprised and generally happy.

However, because books and movies are different mediums, I also don't expect them to be able to do the same things. For example, the Harry Potter movies are okay adaptations but the depth of information that you can get from reading the books pales in comparison to what they have time to show on screen. Or, if you take the scene in Lord of the Rings where Aragorn is supposed to pull out a broken sword and scare the hobbits, well that works really well in the book but would look really silly on screen. And for all the moving of information and changing of things done in the LoTR series, they are fantastic movies. Movies are one person's adaptation of another's work.

That being said, the only movie that I have seen that comes close to an adaptation of Beowulf is "The 13th Warrior" (1999) with Antonio Banderas http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120657/plotsummary. It's really close in feel and setting to the story and some of Beowulf's story comes through. However, it isn't billed as being a story about Beowulf because it's actually an adaptation of a Michael Crichton book which was inspired by, among other things, the story of Beowulf. I don't believe it did very well in the box office due to the somewhat esoteric nature of the movie itself.

If you need a movie version, I would go with that one.
Source(s):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120657/plotsummary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13th_Warrior


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