Seventh Son is a fairly generic, silly tale of witches, dragons, knights and magic which grew on me as I watched it, but failed to satisfy overall.
Adapted from the British fantasy novel by Joseph Delaney, the film follows a powerful old warrior (called a spook) who employs a young apprentice (a seventh son of a seventh son) to help fight an ancient evil.
It's funny seeing Julianne Moore days after her Oscar win for Still Alice hamming it up as an evil queen of darkness here and I quite liked her performance. It's much harder to watch fellow Oscar-winner Jeff Bridges be so god-awful.
He puts on a voice so ridiculous that at times I had horrific flashbacks to Van Helsing. After a while it wasn't so distractingly terrible, but it really was a bad decision - as was naming him 'Gregory' and modeling him so closely on Sir Ian McKellen's Gandalf.
Alicia Vikander and Ben Barnes play the younger duo of main characters who predictably fall for each other and must fight for their forbidden love or something. That storyline was pretty meh, but wow they are a gorgeous couple - both serve as terrific eye-candy.
The story is pretty average as a whole, but as a fan of the genre it was engaging enough and for the last half of the film I was surprisingly interested. There's an old-school, simplistic fairytale quality to it that's kind of endearing.
The biggest problems with the film aren't to do with Bridges' horrible voice, they're all visual. It's an effects-driven fantasy film and, sadly, the CGI generally looks rubbish, and the real action is edited in a ghastly way so you can't see anything actually happen.
That renders the film largely pointless and mildly irritating.
Also, it's plain crazy they didn't use the Iron Maiden song 'Seventh Son of a Seventh Son' once during this.
Two stars.
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Seventh Son
:: Director: Sergey Bodrov
:: Starring: Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Ben Barnes, Olivia Williams, Alicia Vikander, Djimon Hounsou, Kit Harington, Jason Scott Lee
:: Running Time: 120 minutes
:: Release Date: March 5, 2015
source: newshub archive
