The Last Witch Hunter | Breck Eisner | October 23, 2015
It’s saying something when four Hollywood folks of varying levels of talent and little success come together for a supernatural action-adventure film based on one of the lead actor’s D&D characters. And when there’s a 20-year age gap between said lead male and the lead female, too.
The Last Witch Hunter follows Kaulder (Vin Diesel), an 800+ year-old peacekeeper/weapon responsible for helping maintain the truce between witches and the rest of humanity. He’s aided by Dolans (the 36th played by Michael Caine and the 37th played by Elijah Wood), chroniclers working for the Axe and Cross – a branch of the church. What kicks things into gear is a dark/evil witch seeking to bring back the Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht), who cursed Kaulder with her immortality as he delivered a killing blow, to release the Black Plague on modern-day humanity and allow witch-kind to take back the earth. That’s really all you need to know about the plot.
So where to begin? Let me put it bluntly: The Last Witch Hunter isn’t a good movie. It’s not the worst movie in the world, but maybe the worst I’ve seen this year – and I tend to avoid such movies on principle. But what makes it a bad movie? The D&D roots for a start. Video games and board games haven’t translated well – and the same goes for fantasy gaming movies, which might just be Dungeons and Dragons. (Before you ask, I’m counting Pixels and not counting Clue and Wreck-It Ralph in the mix of gaming or game-based movies. Also, I’m holding out hope for Duncan Jones’ Warcraft next summer.) If it was more of a period piece than a pseudo-take on Highlander, it might have been more entertaining. If there was more world-building and explaining of the truce and the meting out of justice and “witch prison” sentences, it might have fared better in my book.
That’s not the biggest issue, though. That honor goes to the flat writing and predictable nature of the movie that comes second to the spectacle of Vin Diesel wielding a flaming sword with and without a head of hair and beard killing the occasional witch and sparing several in modern-day New York. Maybe that rests at the hands of the writing triumvirate of Cory Goodman (Priest) and Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (last year’s Dracula Untold). For a movie about an 800+ year old witch hunter who’s lost everyone he’s close to, there’s little heart. Yes, he misses his long-dead wife and daughter, but that doesn’t weigh as heavily on him as loss has weighed on other immortal characters in the pop culture lexicon.
As for the acting, it’s all passable. Vin Diesel emotes a little (he did better as Groot), Michael Caine phones in wry one-liners, Elijah Wood is very Elijah Wood-y, and Rose Leslie’s second feature-length role since Game of Thrones (the first being Honeymoon) is certainly accented by emotion but she stumbles into several tropes that often befall female action-adventure lead/supporting characters – at least one or two of which you can probably guess.
Whatever the writers and director Breck Eisner were going for, it didn’t pan out in their favor. The Last Witch Hunter is droll with no moments I’d classify as fun, but it’s laughable in a RiffTrax/Mystery Science Theater way. It wants to be taken seriously, but when it’s this riddled with tropes and poor writing, it’s a sign you really can’t take a D&D-inspired film, plop it in modern times, and hope it’ll fly.
Rating: 4.0/10
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