Jack the Giant Slayer Review
Fee Fi Fo Fum. I saw a movie and it was kind of dumb.
I suspect I have some kind of brain disorder that once in a while causes my higher brain functions to temporarily shut down, allowing my stem to make decisions and value judgements (either that or I am just flat out stupid and all of you have been just too kind to tell me. If so, thank you). You see, when I saw the trailer for Jack the Giant Slayer I actually made the mistake of being excited and thinking the possibility of it not sucking could exist.
However, it has been proven that pessimists live longer than optimists and if so the pessimism I have learned doing these reviews will allow me to live to 500. I have a secret desire to see old fairy tales retold and re-imagined as something cool and have experienced the same bitter disappointment when given other Grimm re-do’s like Mirror Mirror or Snow White and the Huntsmen: instead of coming up with some cool twist on the old story they take the story and beat it into a mediocre, mundane shape that is pretty and relatively palatable for the unwashed masses but will never qualify as quality entertainment.
This point was even more driven home with this dross. I should have known when I saw that they cast pretty-boy-of-the-week Nicholas Hoult (Warm Bodies, About a Boy, X-Men First Class) as the lead. Sure, I liked him in Warm Bodies but he was playing a zombie in that one. Hell, I could play a zombie. No, in this one he is pretty clearly here to suck cash out of the pockets of teenage and pre-teen girls. However, the trailer showed huge epic battles with giants wreaking havoc on humans. 
Remember in the prolog of the Fellowship of the Ring when Suaron himself comes out to curb stomp the measly humans and elves. How cool was it when he would send a dozen guys flying with one swing of his mace? That’s what I wanted. The giants come down and start a brutal war and that is what pretty much was sold to us in the trailers.
Nope. Instead we get the usual dross taken from the Big Book of Boring Disney Movie Cliche’s. Any of this sound familiar? Princess wants to run around and know the people. Her dad is going to marry her off to some creepy old guy who also has a plan to conquer the kingdom (given that he was going to be the king anyway can someone tell me why he needed to recruit giants to do it? That was one of the giant plot holes (haw!)) and is more or less evil for evil’s sake. Jack is a lowly peasant who gets magic beans, has a ridiculous series of narrow escapes, rescues the princess, finds the magic MacGuffin that auto-defeats the giants, saves the kingdom, and gets the girl (sorry I should have given a spoiler alert there but if you walked into this film and couldn’t figure out within the first 20 minutes how it was going to end please go stick your head in a wasps nest).
The story. Really, I just gave it to you. Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is some kind of pretty moron who lives with his uncle. The uncle sends him to sell the farm horse and cart (wasn’t it a cow in the story? There is the creative re-imagining I have been begging for. Thanks guys) in order to pay for something. He gets sucked into a puppet show where a he tries to defend a pretty girl from some local color. She turns out to be the Princess (Eleanor Tomlinson-the Illusionist, Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, Alice in Wonderland). Meanwhile the cart he left outside unattended gets stolen but the thieves left the horse (can someone else explain this to me? An expert ring of cart thieves takes the time to unhitch the cart and drag it by hand through the muddy streets (or perhaps hitch it to another horse) but leave the obviously valuable horse in exactly the same position? Wouldn’t it be about 489 times easier to just lead the horse off and sell the horse as well (if nothing else Ikea would buy it for their meatballs apparently)?). Meanwhile a monk (Simon Lowe-NFA, Nowhere Boy, Large) steals some magic beans from the evil adviser to the king. The adviser (Stanley Tucci-the Devil Wears Prada, the Terminal, the Hunger Games) is engaged to the princess in spite of a massive age difference. His secret plan is to use the beans to climb up to the giant kingdom and use the a magic crown that commands giants to do what he wants.
You know, some story recaps feel more like work than others, and this is one. I’m going into super speed mode. The monk trades Jack the beans for his horse to get away. The uncle gets pissed off. The princess ends up at Jacks place during the rain and one of the beans grows up and takes her with it. The king (Ian McShane-Deadwood, Deathrace, Snow White and the Huntsman) sends his best man Elmont (Ewan McGregor-Episodes I-III, Train Spotting, Big Fish), the adviser, the comic relief, Jack, and a big team of redshirts to find her. Things go bad. The giants go berserk but are confounded by a drawbridge. Jack finds the crown and the giants go home. The worst epilog in movie history surfaces. The end.
The stars. If you hadn’t been hoping to see battle royale and are OK with trite teenie bopper stories it’s not bad. One star. The CGI giants were pretty cool. One star. There were some humorous moments early on (if you liked Your Highness you might enjoy it). One star. What action there was present was OK. One star. Total: four stars.
The black holes. Plot holes that were not only huge, but stupid as well. One black hole. The whole move felt like the executive producer was an eight year old girl. One black hole. Overselling the movie and then making it a trite story. One black hole. If cliche’s were stone blocks I think they made the movie castle out of them. One black hole. The kings costume (and later the princesses) were so stupid looking (sorry, but there is no one in the history of warfare who ever, ever thought armor made of gold was a good idea) that they more or less ruined all the work done by all the decent costuming in the rest of the film. One black hole. I guess the producers were so impressed by the stupid non-existant super weapons of the Three Musketeers and Hansel & Gretel that they decided what the film lacked was a fully automatic machine-ballista. One black hole. The action struggled under the PG-13 blanket like a nerd being given a swirlie. One black hole. The human villain couldn’t have appeared more purposelessly evil if he had renamed himself Vlad the Impaler. One black hole. Total: Eight black holes.
So four black holes. Not great, but not brain damagingly bad. Like most of these fairy tale adaptations it sits on the ghetto side of the Mediocre Valley. Worth seeing? Sure if you are looking for something to do and the local fairgrounds is out of deep fried twinkies. If you are going to see it try to see it on the big screen. The giants will look kind of lame on a little one. Date movie? Maybe, if the girl you are seeing has a thing for princesses and unicorns. Otherwise don’t insult her intelligence. Bathroom break? You don’t want to miss the last 30 minutes when the giants open up their can of whoop ass (I’m not saying it’s great. Just that if you sat through the first 84 minutes you might as well see the best part). I’d say the scene right after the first beanstalk falls and the princess is reunited with the king. Not a lot happening there.
Thanks for reading. I also saw 21 and Over this weekend, so my excrement cup runneth over. I’ll write that one up tomorrow. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments on this review or the movie itself feel free to post them below. Off topic questions and suggestions can be sent to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
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