Stars Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Julie Engelbrecht, Joseph Gilgun and Michael Caine Directed by Breck Eisner There is this thing in Hollywood called The Blacklist. This is a annual list of the best scripts yet to be made into movies in any given year. Cory Goodman’s The Last Witch Hunter got listed in 2010. Along the way through production, two writers, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, were brought in for rewrites. The original director Timur Bekmambetov left the project when it got delayed due to star and producer Vin Diesel’s other movie (FF7) being delayed a year. Break Eisner got the gig and here we are. It all makes me very curious what the original script was like, because what we got was a rather run-of-the-mill modern fantasy. The movie follows witch hunter Kaulder (Diesel) who was cursed with immortality by the Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht). Working with a clandestine secret society, The Axe and Cross, Kaulder has maintained a peace between the society and the witches for centuries, until decibels of the Witch Queen begin work to resurrect her, and Kaulder is key to that resurrection. Somewhere in all that is the germ of an epic fantasy adventure that could have been. Diesel carries much of the movie with his charisma but there is little else that seems to be going for it. Eisner’s direction is workman-like that serves to deliver the story but little else. What could be cool in terms of the fight scenes, the visual effects or even the settings seemed to have been dealt a short shrift, like a far tighter budget than expected. It also makes one wonder what Bekmambetov, the visual mastermind behind the likes of Night Watch, Day Watch and Wanted would have made of the material. Still, taken as it is, The Last Witch Hunter can be considered a decent modern fantasy with some decent effects, and would have likely been successful in the video rental era. In this time of higher expectation and crowd-pleasers, the movie is very likely getting a drubbing while suffering the pangs of an origin movie; establishing its ideas, its world and its rules, trying to be bigger than what it appears to be, or rather, what it could have been. Rating **/5
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