Why is nailing fantasy on film so damned hard? While other may debate that the lucrative likes of Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter means that the genre has its fair share of wins, the existence of films like Seventh Son proves that these kinds of movies still need quite a bit of work. Tumbling into cinemas like a drunken mage who’s missed a step on a grand staircase, Seventh Son seemed to follow the How To Make A Fantasy Movie Guide to the letter. It was based on a children’s dark fantasy novel (the awkwardly titled The Spook’s Apprentice by John Delaney), it attracted an impressively starry cast and it had a budget that allowed for a whole wealth of monsters and creatures to populate this magical realm – I mean, what could go wrong?
Quite a lot as it happens as Seventh Son crashed and burned harder than a defective dragon – but 2014 was a long time ago; has Seventh Son managed to get better with age? Believe me, there’s not enough magic in the universe to make that happen…
After being held captive underground for decades, witch queen Mother Malkin escapes and promptly makes a beeline for the man who managed to imprison her – legendary “Spook” (or witch hunter) Master Gregory. However, these days Gregory has become rather fond of drinking and while it’s barely dulled his fighting skills and special abilities, it does make him something of a belligerent arse. But while his well meaning apprentice, William, does his best to keep his master on the straight and narrow, neither are prepared when Malkin makes her return with tragic consequences.
Licking his wounds and in need of a new apprentice, Gregory seeks out another seventh son of a seventh son to fill the vacant position and finds Tom Ward, a simple farmers son who suffers from both clairvoyant vision and a nasty case of Luke Skywalker syndrome. Buying him from his parents, Gregory realises he only has a limited time to get his new ward up to speed while his adversary gathers up her cabal of shape-shifting henchpeople to reform her army and waits for the upcoming Blood Moon to make her invincible. But while her powers grow Tom finds his struggling attempts to meet his master’s expectations thrown off even further by the flirting of Alice, a strange girl he rescues from being burned as a witch.
As time fast runs out, Gregory, Tom and Gregory’s abhuman assistant, Tusk, keep finding side quests that slow their progress, but among the battles with Boggarts and various other adventures, various secrets are gradually released. What is Gregory’s original connection to Malkin? Who is Alice really? And what secret lurks within Tom’s family that suggests he might have the chutzpah to have the right stuff after all?
To deliver a good, well-rounded fantasy film, it helps if you can strike a good balance between the necessary world building and making this realm of magic and monsters both grounded and magical enough to hit that sweet spot. Get the mixture right, and you’ve created a fantastical potion that knows when to offer up wondrous sights and when to give this world room to breathe – but if you get it wrong you get something very close to Seventh Son, a sword and sorcery misfire that aggressively hurls everything it has at the wall only to seem virtual all of it slough off to splatter on the floor. You can see that someone somewhere was banking big on the first adaptation of Delaney’s series, but while you get plenty of bang for your buck (promising cast, plenty of monsters), it’s truly impressive how much of it stubbonly refuses to work.
It would be easy to point a dragon-nailed finger at Russian director Sergei Bodrov and claim that the Mongol: The Rise Of Genghis Kahn director wasn’t used to a big, Hollywood production, but when you account for the fact that it should have been released as early as 2013 and instead got caught up in the split between Warners and Legendary Pictures which caused it’s release to be repeatedly pushed back, you can’t help but think that some frenzied re-edits may have taken place. Whatever the reason, Seventh Son is a mess and watching it feels like trying to wade through fantasy fan fiction written by a twelve year old that been huffing paint all day. The aggressive editing refuses to let literally anything settle as it’s too busy hopping from football to agitated foot to move onto the next loud setpiece despite the fact that it has some fairly important groundwork to lay down. As a result, we speedwalk through most of the setup that introduces the unfortunately named Spooks as grizzled, Witcher-esque, monster hunters and the escape of the supreme b-word of supernatural spell casters which is unfortunate especially considering we could have used a 10 minute break to get used to Jeff Bridges’ uniquely whacked-out performance.
I’m not entirely sure what the veteran actor is trying to achieve – A medieval approximation of his mush-mouthed take on Rooster Cogburn? A version of Gandalf that’s struggling with a violent alcohol addiction? Both? – but it’s almost hypnotic to watch as Bridges blunders through the film, seemingly unaware or simply uninterested whether or not his acting actually fits the material. Maybe he’s trying to be the unpredictable Johnny Depp/Jack Sparrow of the picture, but while his outing as the grumbling Gregory entertains for all the wrong reasons, at least he’s putting the effort in which is more than can be said for Julianne Moore’s rather colourless villain. While Bridges goes for broke with facial expressions that suggest he has a mouthful of chewing tobacco when he clearly hasn’t, Moore gives us that rarest of things – a phoned in, doing-it-for-the-paycheck performance that sees her wisely let her extravagant costumes do the heavy lifting.
Stuck between these two polar opposites of performances, everyone else seems lost. Ben Barnes gives us a passable hero in training while Alicia Vikander similarly puts the work in as a love instead with a predictably dark secret, but everyone else is horribly under served. Why hire Olivia Williams and Djimon Hounsou if you’re barely going to use them? Why introduce a string of inhuman acolytes with funky powers to serve the big bad when they hardly get a look in? Why enlist recognisable actors at all when so many of them have a habit of suddenly transforming into creatures formed of unconvincing CGI? However, despite all these questions demanding some sort of answer, all the filmmakers have up their sleeves are repeated, fast moving action sequences that are deployed to cover over the cracks.
While I have to admit I was hypnotised by whatever the hell Jeff Bridges was trying to achieve, Seventh Son ends up being a runt of the fantasy litter simply by being far too energetic for its own good. Replacing solid world building for progressively louder action sequences, this is another example of a potential fantasy franchise driving itself into the ground before it can properly take flight.
🌟🌟
We Have Issues 