I respect Bryan Singer as a filmmaker. His first film “The Usual Suspects” was a clever, twisty indie thriller and it projected a lot of promise for its young writer/director team. A few years later he brought the X-men out of the comics and onto the screen, essentially kicking off the superhero, action movie genre that has practically engulfed all of summer entertainment since. His take on the material was both thoughtful and sophisticated and by connecting the subject matter with both his Jewish and gay identity, he helped people realize that comic book movies don’t have to be campy to be entertaining and that they can legitimately delve into deeper themes.
However, since his work on the first two “X-Men” films, he has seemed to struggle with his place in mainstream filmmaking. When he abandoned “X3: The Last Stand” to make “Superman Returns” he underwhelmed most of his fanboy fan base with a messy attempt at rebooting a dead franchise. Later, in an effort to make an adult-minded film again, he did “Valkyrie”, a troubled, but somewhat underrated World-War 2 procedural that was hobbled by bad, Tom Cruise-related publicity. Now, after a fairly long break, he has brought us “Jack the Giant Slayer”, another in a string of gritty, action-movie, fairy-tale revisions. And like “Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters” and “Snow White and the Huntsmen”, it’s not very good.
“Warm Bodies” star, Nicholas Hoult, stars as Jack, a poor village boy who falls in love with a princess (Eleanore Tomlinson) and who has recently sold his horse to a runaway monk for some magic beans. When he accidently drops one of the beans into the floorboards of his cabin, a mile long beanstalk sends his home into the clouds and takes the princess with it. The King (Deadwood’s Ian McShane) then employs Jack and a team of knights and noblemen to bring his daughter back. This rescue crew includes a hopeful hero (Ewan McGregor) and the secretly malevolent air to the throne (Stanley Tucci). When they reach the top of the beanstalk, they accidently incite a war with an army of man-eating giants, who plan to come down to earth and stake the land for their own.
This is by far Singer’s worst film. The script is cobbled together by chunks of better movies and as the plot slogs from one poorly lit, awkwardly shot, pointlessly 3D, CGI action scene to the next, you can’t help but wonder how much money you might have saved had you just stayed home and watched “Aladdin”, “Lord of the Rings”, “Legend” and “Princess Bride”. Nothing in it is original and even worse nothing in it is fun. Things happen and the characters are propelled from one flashy event to another, but nobody seems to be enjoying themselves while they do it. The actors appear bored to be there and every performance in this movie reeks of a confused cast that’s chasing a tennis ball tied to stick, in front of a green-screen, with absolutely no idea what the visual outcome is supposed to be.
Every now and then the movie will show some signs of latent entertainment and Stanley Tucci continues to prove—as he did in “The Lovely Bones” and “Burlesque”—that he refuses to look bad, no matter the quality what he is in. But those moments are rare and what “Jack the Giant Slayer” contributes for the rest of its running time is poor visual effects, muddy cinematography, and a paint-by-numbers screenplay, in the service of a plodding, labored action fantasy that doesn’t know what age it’s trying to appeal to or how to keep its audience involved in the motivations of its characters. This was not only another unfortunate misfire for Bryan Singer but a depressing and lethally dreary failure of storytelling.
Grade: D –
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2013
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