Let's Review: Jack the Giant Slayer

 

Welcome back to the Geekdom, I’ll be your Guide. Now I have to ask, what is with the recent trend of taking old fairy tales and turning them into darker action flicks? This trend hasn’t really worked well for any of them, I mean sure I’ve liked a few of them but most of them are fairly cheesy with really hammy acting. I honestly wasn’t going into this film expecting a lot, given the current history of these darker action fairy tales. Was I proven wrong? Let’s review Jack the Giant Slayer.

The Negative

Two of the major villains simply had no substance to them. These two characters, Lord Roderick and Wicke, were hiding nothing; they flaunted how evil they were to everyone. I honestly hate characters like these in films. This is like the Saturday morning cartoon super villain; being the advisor, being evil, and nobody seems to notice that he is evil. Really guys? No one else sees him plotting in the corner with his minion? Speaking of his minion, Wicke was an impossibly stupid character. I honestly couldn’t stand to see him on the screen; he just annoyed the crap out of me.

I'm not an expert on medieval garb, but Jack looks like he is wearing modern clothes throughout the entire film. Jack appears to be wearing a dusty brown jacket with a hood and jean colored shorts. That’s something I would expect to see out on the streets today. I found myself looking to see if he was also wearing a pair of Nike sneakers. The costumes weren’t exactly great for everyone else either, but they at least looked like they belonged in that era, Jack just looked like he was lost in time.

 

Bryan Singer promoted the crap out of the fact that some of the giants would have multiple heads. There was only one giant that had 2 heads and the second head was mentally challenged with a speech impediment. This head was used for comic relief. Do I really need to go into grand detail as to why this was a horrendous move on their part and should never have been a part of the film in the first place? I thought not, moving on.

Some of the acting was extensively hammed up. These people are facing incredibly life threatening events, and they are acting as if this is a whimsical day at the park. I’m all for being lighthearted but this is borderline ridiculousness. It didn’t help that the make-up and costumes made everybody looked poofed up for the ball.

The Positive

 

There were multiple moments when I didn't know which direction the film was going to go in. Many of the main characters are very suddenly and violently killed off throughout the film. I had expected some of these characters to survive to the end of the film, but they just kept killing them off. This killing spree leads to a really neat level of shock and suspense for the film. I honestly couldn’t tell you which characters were going to survive to the end of the film and so I actually felt a sense of worry for the characters I was watching.

 

The giants were fantastically well done. I have found that overly large CGI characters have a tendency to appear under-detailed or do not mesh well with the world they are placed in, but I was really surprised to find these character models fully rendered and fleshed out. The giants held a very looming presence on the screen the entire film. I kind of wish we had gotten to see more of them become main characters, only a few of them had big parts with the majority of them just taking up the background.

In Conclusion

 

This wasn’t a particularly bad re-telling of the old fairy tale, but it wasn’t particularly good either. The lighthearted nature of the film felt really uneven with the horrific events that were occurring onscreen. I kind of wish they had taken themselves more seriously instead of making a mediocre comedy action flick. 3 out of 5.