Seventh Son
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Ben Barnes
Directed By: Sergey Bodrov
Reviewed by Brendan Dousi
[Rating: 2/5]
The early 2000’s really did change the face of cinema. If you think back, that is when most of todays successful franchises started. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, X-Men, The Fast and the Furious, the list goes on. Ever since then, though, studios have been scrambling to recreate that money-making magic. Sometimes they succeed (The Hunger Games) but mostly they fail (Eragon, The Golden Compass), but lord knows they never stop trying. The first attempt of 2015 comes in the form of Seventh Son directed by Sergey Bodrov, a medieval fantasy film based off of the popular books series The Wardstone Chronicles. Will Seventh Son break free of the pack and succeed to entertain and engage enough to warrant establishing a franchise, or will it simply flounder and disappear with the rest of Hollywood’s desperate efforts?
Gregory (Jeff Bridges) is looking for a new apprentice. After the extremely powerful witch Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore) breaks free of what was supposed to be her eternal prison, hunts him down and kills his current Apprentice, the drunken Gregory begrudgingly decides to track down the simple farm hand who dreams of bigger things, Tom Ward (Ben Barnes), and make him his next victim, ah, I mean apprentice. Gregory is what is known as a ‘Spook’, a man whose duty is to hunt down and detain or kill various mystical beasts and nasties. Spook apprentices don’t last very long and Gregory’s have been dropping like flies. That is under usual circumstances where they have years of training, but Gregory only has one week to train Tom before they have to go out on a quest to stop Mother Malkin from destroying the world. Can they succeed or will all they know be plunged into an eternal Dark Age full of lava and brimstone?
It’s always baffled me how a Fantasy film can exist that looks bland. Surely any filmmaker worth their salt will get their hands on a Fantasy film would want to at the very least make that world look, well, fantastic. Apparently not when it comes to Bodrov and Seventh Son. It probably has a lot to do with the studios involved, but that’s no excuse. Even a studio executive should know that a fantasy world should look interesting and mystical. Instead Seventh Son just looks plain and homogeneous, lacking any pigment of character and over-stuffed with an offensive amount of ‘Days of our Lives’ soap-opera haze. Add to that the over-reliance on extremely average CGI and you have yourself an extremely uninteresting looking film.
Bland looking films, however, can be saved by an imaginative script, unfortunately Seventh Son isn’t one of those films. Just as basic and uninspired as the rest of the film, the script brings absolutely nothing interesting or new to the table. It’s your below-average Hero’s journey with a tacked-on Romeo and Juliet romance and some absolutely god-awful pacing towards the middle of the film. Things get so exposition heavy in the middle that you may find yourself nodding off, especially when the two love birds are on the scene exhibiting negative levels of on-screen chemistry. Ben Barnes does well and is even a little charismatic as the lead, Julianne Moore is a little uninspired as Mother Malkin and Jeff Bridges hams it up completely as Master Gregory coming across as an angrier, more drunken Gandalf. This is a little jarring at first, to be sure, but it kind of grows on you as the film progresses.
Seventh Son is basic, homogeneous and uninspired but not completely unwatchable. Its two leads certainly have charm and there are some interesting enough set-pieces that just may make this film worth your while if you are truly starved for some Fantasy action. It is safe to say, however, that Seventh Son definitely doesn’t have what it takes to establish itself as the franchise the studio was undoubtedly hoping it could be.
