The Last Witch Hunter review

The Last Witch Hunter (12A/PG-13, 106 mins)
Director: Breck Eisner
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

When you’re the star of what is currently the most lucrative franchise in cinema and can pretty much take your pick of projects, it looks like an odd choice for Vin Diesel to pitch himself front and centre in a hokey-looking fantasy horror.

There have been no shortage of duds involving witches and their ilk of late, and anything with a whiff of Dungeons and Dragons has been roundly rejected by audiences. And yet The Last Witch Hunter, while by no means particularly good, sets its sights on a low bar and clears it with some style. By maintaining a sense of fun and of its own silliness it stays on just the right side of ripe, and Diesel more or less manages to sell it, even through the nonsense he's forced to speak.

A meaty prologue gives us medieval Vin, where he and his beardy, leather-clad pals tackle a witch queen who has been terrorising the lands and is responsible for spreading the plague. The only way to deal with her is, of course, by sticking her through the heart. Diesel’s character, named Kaulder, manages this, but in the process the witch curses him with immortality.

There can be only one, and 800 years later we're in modern day New York where Kaulder functions as a guardian, keeping an eye on witches and making sure they stick to their code of not bothering the humans. Given that the title conjures notions of him spending most of the running time, well, hunting witches, it’s not the all out action fest that might have been expected.

Instead there’s a lot time devoted to details and backstory. There’s an old priest and a young priest, played by Michael Caine and Elijah Wood, who are known as Dolans, an order of aides who have been by Kaulder’s side through the centuries. With Caine’s Dolan 36 about to hand over the reins to Wood’s 37, he comes under attack, leading Kaulder to investigate what some bad witches may be up to in the city.

When it comes to plotting The Last Witch Hunter is largely gibberish, particularly in a final third that grows increasingly undisciplined. But there are still some worthwhile developments along the way and in terms of the mythology created, it actually contains one or two original ideas.

It's not been put together on the usual mega budget but the special effects and production design are of an accordingly decent standard, and it really does look very nice. It has a sense of humour, Diesel is a competent star, and for daft undemanding fun you could do a lot worse.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters review

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (15/R, 88 mins)
Director: Tommy Wirkola
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

For some reason we’ve had any number of fairytale reimaginings lately, to varying degrees of success. This time around the classic Grimm story of brother and sister Hansel and Gretel gets a demented action twist added, and proves to be reasonable value for the undemanding.

We first meet Hansel and Gretel as children, when they are taken at night by their father deep into the woods, where they discover a house made of candy. Instead of falling prey to the witch inside, they destroy her, setting in motion their careers as witch hunters extraordinaire.

Many years later, as adults played by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, they're heroes who travel around the country sorting out witch problems wherever they find them. They arrive at a town where children have been going missing, soon discovering that the local witch (Famke Janssen) has been snatching them, and she’s up to no good with some mumbo-jumbo about becoming all-powerful at the blood moon.

Wisely played tongue in cheek, otherwise it would collapse under its own stupidity, Hansel and Gretel is a cheesy and passably entertaining action fantasy. It’s not really concerned with anything other than witch-fighting action, which the armed-to-the-teeth siblings engage in frequently. These scenes are frantically edited and initially quite samey, but the high level of blood and gore makes for good clean Friday night fun.

Thanks to a $50m budget, production values are high, which can help immensely with this sort of thing - there’s nothing worse than a ridiculous film that looks ugly at the same time. And the special effects are really pretty tidy, particularly a troll who comes to have quite a bearing on the story.

In the leads, Renner and Arterton display little personality, but as the only Americans in the village, their swearing and modern sensibilities in what one supposes is the 19th century offers the chance for a few nice gags.

Events proceed without much care or sense from one barney to the next, but if you’re willing to accept the utter absurdity of the setup, there are a whole lot worse examples of this brand of goofy fantasy action out there.

Beautiful Creatures review

Beautiful Creatures (12A/PG-13, 124 mins)

Director: Richard LaGravenese

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The quest to be the next Twilight continues apace with this surprisingly intelligent but ultimately doomed teen fantasy that uses witches as its supernatural vehicle of choice. It starts like most high school dramas, with clever student Ethan standing out among his class of standard issue clichés, until the arrival of newcomer Lena, a member of the mysterious, much gossiped about Duchannes family, shakes things up and the two start to fall for each other. But the Duchannes are witches, with Lena’s uncle (Jeremy Irons) doing his best to keep Ethan away until she turns into either a good or bad witch on her 16^th birthday, part of a mythology that can be rewarding but is often hokey and confused. The Deep South setting is atmospheric, though the special effects aren’t great, as it seesaws between a smart and edgy first half and a badly underwritten second, with a weak finale that comes close to derailing the lot. But what has come before, though there’s far too much of it, is sufficiently romantic and angsty to keep the target audience ticking over.