I’ve heard reports of DNS issues, which means that some folks aren’t getting to see today’s installment of Schlock Mercenary.
Here it is.
The Last Witch Hunter
As direct-to-DVD movies go, The Last Witch Hunter is surprisingly oh wait I saw this in the theater.
I had fun, but here I am a day later trying to write a review, and the movie has already faded into the meld-haze of urban fantasy “hidden world” films in which a badass protagonist fights ultimate evil. Why did this even get made?
Maybe because Vin Diesel is a giant nerd, and wanted to make a sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre movie that he got to be in?
Look, I had fun during the film. It cleared my Threshold of Disappointment (unlike the OTHER Vin Diesel film I saw this year) and was interesting enough that I did not finish my popcorn or my soda.
But it was predictable, and sloppy, and took shortcuts, and could have been a truly memorable, outstanding addition to a crowded field full of similar things. Here’s a bulleted list of sins which, had they not been committed, could have allowed this film over my Threshold of Awesome.
- Shaky-cam during cool action
- Shaky-cam as a “oh no we’re getting slaughtered” device
- Shaky-cam
- Cliché dialog as a shortcut for selling us an emotional state.
- Immortality as a boon/curse, which (gasp) can be taken away.
- Betrayal we all saw coming.
- Why didn’t you just lead with that?
- If you have little vials of “detect magic,” you should be using them all the time, or you should be explaining that they are expensive/rare.
- Man of few words who seldom shows emotion
- Because he’s tortured by memories
- Which we are going to have to sit through
- But it’s okay because they’re central to the plot.
It’s a long list, I know. A great many genre movies commit these same sins, and are mediocre-to-bad as a result. It’s a good thing I like Vin Diesel, and an even better thing that Rose Leslie (who I’d never seen in a film before) shone the way she did in a cast full of bigger names.
(Note: If there is a sequel that has ZERO Vin Diesel, and is all about Rose Leslie’s character Chloe taking up the Witch Hunter mantle despite being herself a witch, I would pay opening night fancy-seat money. No, wait… just give her a franchise of her own, without the baggage of this film.)
That reminds me:
- A non-immortal character who is interesting, and who we care about, who can be threatened with death to make us feel tension
The Last Witch Hunter enters my list at #20 out of #30. Do I recommend it? When it hits Netflix it might make for a great excuse to have the TV on while you knit something. If you’ve got movie money to spend, though, there are many much better options.
What Can I Put On A Platform Saddle?
ARK: Survival Evolved added platform saddles for the largest dinos, and then added a ginormous bird thing, the Quetzlcoatus, which could carry one of those saddles.
I built a ramp, and discovered I could carry a sabertooth across the island.
I got to wondering what else I could walk up the ramp.
Yes, that’s an albino T-Rex (named Albany) standing on a platform on the back of a monstrous “bird.”
The next question was whether the bird could take off. The obvious answer to this question was “I hope the platform isn’t correctly calculating its load, because this is going to be awesome.”
Oh my.
The bird CAN take off.
This is the happiest T-Rex in the whole game.
(Please do not shoot at my bird.)
Pan and Goosebumps
If you’re going to re-imagine a bit of written fiction through film, and if you plan to treat the source material as canonical inspiration for an amendment of that same canon, you’re setting a high bar for yourself.
Goosebumps clears it. Pan does not.
I’ll grant that Pan had a higher bar to clear, what with Barrie’s work being a century-plus-ten-percent old. Still, Goosebumps has been part of the popular consciousness for many moviegoers’ entire lives, so for those folks, both have been around for as long as they can remember.
Pan was clumsy. It was a very by-the-numbers origin story painted over the top of the heroic monomyth, and as others have already said, its biggest mistake was giving us a Peter Pan who was kind, brave, and heroic. That’s not really who Peter Pan IS. Not really.
I have neither time nor patience to enumerate the other mistakes. Pan was pretty, but it made an absolute mess of its mythos, and was head-scratchy and disturbing in the wrong ways (“why did they even MAKE this movie?”) rather than the right ways (“oh, this says so much about the parallels between innocence and evil…”)
Goosebumps, on the other hand, went way out on a limb and gave us a single meta-story in which all of the Goosebumps stories share canon. To its infinite credit, I did not think of Jumanji even one time while in the theater. If you’re going to borrow a high concept, this is a sure sign you’re pulling it off correctly.
Goosebumps is more of a spooky-action-comedy than a “horror” movie, but the trailers make that pretty clear. Yes, there are creepy dolls and jump scares, but there’s also a lot of running around and successfully DOING things, which makes everything less horrible. The performances were all solid, and Jack Black was very entertaining to watch.
Fun-wise, Pan enters my 2015 list at #26, below the Threshold of Disappointment. Goosebumps comes in at #17, which is respectable, but still not above the Threshold of Awesome.