Lucas
Versantvoort / 17 Nov 2015
The Last Witch
Hunter is a classic case of wasted potential. As I was watching it, I was blown
away by how many interesting stories could have been told. As it is now, it's a
regular action flick...but I guess that was apparent with the name Vin Diesel
splayed on the poster.
It's the
year....actually I don't know when we are, but there's a bunch of Vikings
talking about killing a witch queen, so we at least know what's going on...sort
of. Vin Diesel kills the witch queen, but she senses his tragic past involving
his dead wife and child and before she dies condemns him to live forever. Cut
to present day New York where Diesel is part of a covenant dedicated to locking
up witches. He has an old advisor, played by Michael Caine (who seems to be
trying to usurp Morgan Freeman's position as the King of Narrators), called a
*sigh* Dolan (yes, seriously) who one evening discusses with Diesel his
loneliness. Diesel's lived so long, he says, but there's a difference between living
and 'living', you see. The next day, Caine turns up dead. A new Dolan played by
Elijah Wood (who seems cursed to play creepy roles which I think might be due
to his haircut) is inaugurated. They find out black magic was involved and so
together they start looking for the one responsible. This leads them to
discover that the dead witch queen might not be as dead as they thought.
The main source
of tension here is the presence of lots of world-building without actually
making good on any of it. You've got Vikings vs witches, modern-day witch
hunters and the reference to how Diesel's immortality made him witness the
likes of Napoleon and Stalin. Can you imagine Vin Diesel battling witches in
those time periods? Instead, the filmmakers felt the need to bring the concept
of witches and witch hunters to the present. The film throws all these rules
and words at us, but they don't mean anything; they're just that, words. And
deep down we know the film doesn't care either. Watching Ygritte, I mean Rose
Leslie, talk about 'snowdonia's' with a straight face is something else. All
this world-building just ends up being frustrating, because you start wondering
what the film would look like had any of it actually been relevant in the
end.
The character
development is lackluster and it's not just because Diesel's not exactly a
character actor, though he compensates with likability (and that gravelly voice
that theatre speakers make more booming every day). The story tries to make his
curse, his immortality, seem so dramatic, but Diesel doesn't seem too upset
about it and neither does the film seem anxious to pursue this dramatic angle.
Can you imagine how interesting it would be had the film focused on this notion
of living forever? How it would influence the way you see the world and so on?
Ugh, there's so much I could critique story-wise, but we're going to be here
all night if I do that. Rose Leslie plays the sexy redhead witch who ends up
being Diesel's love interest which I can't see happening in any kind of reality.
The Big Bad witch complains about how humans are the intruders, the real
villains and so on. Imagine if this was turned into the real story, where
humans and witches realize they both see each other as the invaders and so on.
Maybe, in the end, they'd realize they're not so differ--Ha! Who am I kidding?
Just blow their heads off with a shotgun.
To its credit,
the film is occasionally pretty to look at, though this argument tends to feel
more like a fail-safe nice guy comment: the movie sucks, but hey, at least it
looks nice. I can't in all honesty recommend The Last Witch Hunter. Though it
has a consistent tone, the amount of wasted potential was very frustrating.
Maybe its inevitable sequel will improve on what's wrong with it aka
everything, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
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