★☆☆☆☆
One Star
There were clearly high hopes for the big screen adaptation of the first of Joseph Delaney’s fantasy novels about a young Spook’s apprentice, but a seemingly never-ending gestation period in post-production limbo seemed to set its fate in stone. With such a tumultuous history behind it, it’s no wonder that the final result is a shambolic mess of medieval sword-and-sorcery drudgery. Somewhere along the line, Russian director Sergei Bodrov’s pseudo-epic venture into English language filmmaking seems to have somehow got more than a little bit lost in translation.
The film follows “Spook” Master Gregory, a chivalric protector of humanity against supernatural forces, played by a dazed and confused Jeff Bridges. After his apprentice is killed in action, Gregory hurriedly seeks a replacement to take on the evil Mother Malkin – who takes the form of Julianne Moore in complete Goth attire when she isn’t a gargantuan dragon. After a remarkably brief search, Gregory chooses scrawny but good-hearted Thomas Ward (Ben Barnes) to take up the mantle of his next apprentice, all because he is the seventh son of a seventh son (AKA: an ancestry.com nightmare), and because Thomas is plagued by recurring visions of their quests together.
It must surely take some effort to reduce actors of Jeff Bridges’ and Julianne Moore’s calibre to such painfully empty performances. Bridges appears to have sourced Gregory’s voice from somewhere between Gandalf the Grey and Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. He pushes out each word with the intonation of an asthmatic chimpanzee, fashioning a character even more inaudible and incoherent than his Rooster Cogburn in 2010’s True Grit. Julianne Moore should have been blessed with a deliciously juicy ice-queen – as fun and playful as Susan Sarandon in Enchanted – but instead she can’t make head or tail of dialogue unfit for a pantomime villain. You’d have thought the onscreen reunion of these Big Lebowski stars would have been something magical, but there isn’t a single spark between them.
Bodrov evidently didn’t have much of a plan for his performers. The English actors are sporting American accents, the American actors are sporting English accents, and Swedish actress Alicia Vikander is caught somewhere in between as the pointy-shoed two-dimensional squeeze. Even Olivia Williams as Thomas’ mother, harbouring a major plot secret of her own, doesn’t appear to have a clue what is going on, and a sorely underused Djimon Hounsou spends more time in beast-form than he does in person. We can’t blame him.
It seems that even the filmmakers get tripped up over the muddled ridiculousness of the plot at times. At one point, Thomas literally steps into the shoes of the audience and screams at his master what’s on everyone’s lips, “you have to explain things!”, to which Gregory nonchalantly retorts, “no time!”. It’s funny how one minute Gregory is barking that there is absolutely no time to lose when Thomas pesters him with questions the screenwriters clearly couldn’t be bothered to answer, but then all of a sudden there is ample time for a lengthy training session montage, simply because Thomas asks for it (and says “please”).
Undoubtedly intended to launch a fully fleshed fantasy franchise, audiences will be profoundly disheartened by this vacuous first (and thus probably only) installment. There is simply no escaping or excusing the vapid dialogue, the chaotic artistic direction (Thomas Ward is consistently clad in something of a “medieval” hoodie), and the overbearing feeling that the film wants to be over and done with faster than we want it to be. What a tragic waste of time and talent.
