Yes, I know how the movie would like to portray him as he eventually did slay the main witch, in as anticlimactic a manner as possible to boot, but it felt more like a series of fortunate events as opposed to his progression from apprentice to badass witch hunter. He's, for the most part, useless and he doesn't do anything to make you believe he could hold his own against any witch of any worth his/her money. I don't think he's any better than when he started. And that's another thing, Bridges' character is part of an order that is all but extinct and yet Tom, Ben's character, is supposed to keep it from dying? I'm sorry, but the film did a terrible job at portraying Tom's progress as a witch hunter/killer/what have you. Turns out this seventh son is also half-witch so that makes him special, since he's the only one with these attributes. Bridges' character recruits a seventh son of a seventh son in order to fight witches. And I say that's the only thing it had going for it because, really, who thought the story was gonna be anything worth talking about.
The story isn't much to write home about and neither is the action, which is what this film, realistically, only had going for it if it wasn't gonna be entertainingly awful. Ben Barnes is a little bit bland as a leading man and he lacks the charisma to truly carry a film on his own, but he's a decent enough actor to hold his own. And, you know what, they still did about as much as they could with it. I don't wanna say their performances were inspired, but I think that even these three knew the fate that would befall this movie. Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges and Olivia Williams (in an abbreviated role) are always good. It just wasted its chance to do something silly here.
Which is weird considering that this is, slightly, superior to the two films I've just mentioned. It would fall somewhere along the middle of those two films. Let's just say it wasn't quite as bad as 47 Ronin and it wasn't quite as entertainingly bad as The Room was. That's what I was referring to when I meant there could be some fun had with this, not that I actually thought it was going to be any good. There's still some hints of that here, but I don't think it ended providing enough genre fun to make it worth watching in a so bad it's entertaining kind of way. Of course it was at the very beginning and before the film and its story started progressing, but the set-up was definitely there for it to be an unpretentious, silly film. There was even a point in the film where I thought I could actually have some fun watching this. I don't think there's any way that this film, in spite of how bad it is, actually reaches that level.
This is actually a slightly better movie than 47 Ronin which, despite having some B-movie charm, was an absolute disaster in terms of taking a concept and completely ruining it by throwing every wacky idea at the wall without much of a filter. In fact, this is closer to 47 Ronin, the Keanu Reeves version, than it is to The Hobbit, LOTR, Harry Potter, etc. It's obviously not trying to compete with that. But there's a point in the film where I realized that this was, really, more of a B-movie than something that was meant to compete with, say, The Hobbits of the world. I realize that's not exactly high praise considering that the trailers made it look like the worst movie in about 5 years and I would still consider this bad. But I digress, this film isn't nearly as bad as the trailers made it out to be. Iron Monkey is the next review, so my luck will, hopefully, change tonight. It appears I'm being struck with that lack of luck in finding a good movie to review. I'd have to go back to see how long it actually was, but let's just say it was a month. I hated that movie so much, but after I reviewed that, there was period of about a month where I did not review a good movie. Last time this happened it was with Cars 2. Actually it's only been close to 3 weeks since that. This streak of not having seen any good movies since The Dead Zone is never going to end.
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