Seventh Son

When you put your big (and long delayed) fantasy film up against a space epic from the Wachowskis and the long-awaited sequel to a beloved cartoon that appeals to both children and adults, you're pretty much asking for your film to tank. And when the film is all sorts of terrible rolled into one (mercifully short) film, well, it's clear the studio is just trying to bury the project.

And that's weird, because the pedigree should work. Inspired by the popular book series "The Wardstone Chronicles," "Seventh Son" is based on the saga's first novel, "The Spook's Apprentice." (In America the title was changed to "The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch," for reasons clearly obvious to anyone that knows derogatory slang. The fact that the film continuously refers to a character as a "spook" is both amusing and uncomfortable in equal measure. For instance, did no one raise their hand and say "you know we need to change this, right?") It features two award winning actors and is based on a beloved book series. What could go wrong?

The plot of the film is straight-forward and so much so it reads like the plot of every single fantasy book ever written. A witch named Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore) is banished into a hole by a "spook" named Master Gregory (Jeff Bridges), who fights preternatural evil. Ten years later, the witch escapes her prison and gets retribution on Master Gregory by killing his apprentice. So off Gregory goes to find another, so he can end Mother Malkin's reign once and for all. But his apprentice can't be just anyone. The "prophecies" state it must be the seventh son of a seventh son (I assume of a seventh son, and so on), so Master Gregory shows up at some farm to fetch Tom Ward (Ben Barnes) who just happens to be a -- you guessed it -- seventh son.

Alas, Tom is "too skinny" to be a seventh son, and he can't hit the side of a building with a sledgehammer, so, golly gee, does Master Gregory ever have his work cut out for him. Unsurprisingly, Master Gregory is a grumpy old man who seems displeased at having to train another wet-behind-the-ears apprentice. Even worse, an apprentice usually trains for ten years, but with Mother Malkin plotting to take over the world (do villains ever do anything else?) they only have a week to prepare for battle. "A week???" But prepare they do, while fighting off Mother Malkin's denizens as she tries to retrieve a sacred stone that used to belong to her but that now resides around Tom's neck. "It's was my mam's."

The training consists of Tom continually trying to throw knives at a human skull with no success. He also has a few "tests," but as the plot would have it, those get sort of tossed to the side in favor of a random plot that involves Tom falling for a witch named Alice (Alicia Vikander), even though there is not one interaction between them that would precipitate their falling in love.

Meanwhile, Mother Malkin skulks around her stone estate in any number of elaborate dresses slinking her tail behind her and occasionally turning into a dragon. Actually, not occasionally. In the first ten minutes of the film she does this three times. By the time she battled another dragon at film's end, there was a collective yawn from the audience.

There's not much plot here except Tom going through a few tests where he shows he's not ready for battle, yet we all know in the end he will rise to the occasion and "hit his mark." Master Gregory will eventually soften up, and the truth about Alice's true feelings will be revealed. (Who cares?)

As directed by Sergey Bodrov ("Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan") and adapted by Charles Leavitt ("Blood Diamond" "K-PAX") and Steven Knight ("The Hundred-Foot Journey") based on a screen story by Matt Greenberg ("Reign of Fire"), the film is a unyielding mix of constant action, noise, and music. The script takes no time in making Tom a character to root for. Within minutes of seeing him on screen he is taken away by the spook, so we have no connection to him at all. This makes the entire movie a giant shrug, because we haven't been given anyone to relate to. While Ben Barnes ("The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe") is an appealing actor, he's also a bit bland. Jeff Bridges (who forever should be now referred to as Mumble Mouth) spends the entire movie saying his lines as "LOUD DECLARATIONS." In fact, that's what the entire cast does, which brings me to poor Julianne Moore.

I'm sure when she signed on she felt she would be the latest A-Lister to join the cast of a popular Young Adult novel turned Film Series ala: "The Hunger Games" or "Divergent." Alas, she gets saddled with this snooze-fest. She tries her best to be the wicked witch of whatever country they are in (they all have American accents, yet it's clearly not the U.S. of A.), and you'd hope she'd have fun sinking her teeth into an over-the-top character. Instead, you just feel sorry for her because the part is so underwritten she might as well be a character in "H.R. Pufnstuf."

To make matters worse, the entire film is ugly to look at and the special effects are clearly special effects. Say what you want about the perfectly wonderful silliness of "Jupiter Ascending," at least that film has characters to applaud and is visually spectacular. Everything here is muddy and bland. It's like "Krull" meets "Willow," but not as good as either. There is no world created for us to latch on to. We are just given archetypal characters set against a bland landscape. There is no sense of whom these people are or what their lives are like.

Because of this, you might find yourself napping. of course, with the wall-to-wall bombastic score by Marco Beltrami, that might be impossible.