Rating:
5 out of 10
The Last Witch Hunter Cast:
Vin Diesel as Kaulder
Rose Leslie as Chloe
Elijah Wood as Dolan 37th
Ólafur Darri Ólafsson as Belial
Rena Owen as Glaeser
Julie Engelbrecht as Witch Queen
Michael Caine as Dolan 36th
Review:
Introducing new and enticing fantasy requires juggling two competing imperatives, both necessary and neither particularly useful to the other. On the one hand they must perform the most elementary function of all successful fiction — creating engaging characters an audience will identify with. Characters like the enigmatic Kaulder (Vin Diesel), an 800-year old man who deals with the existential burden of immortality by focusing on work – in his case hunting down and killing witches.
There’s a lot of ground to be covered by mining the inner life of someone who innately views the human experience from an alien perspective (and The Last Witch Hunter is at its best when it does so), but the film has its hands too full for that. Because it’s also urban fantasy story with magic and monsters and mythology, it has to spend considerable time building the world Kaulder and his friends live in and the rules they abide by.
Theoretically, there’s no reason why these imperatives should be competing at all, but the reality is a feature film has a limited time frame in which to deliver all the necessary information for understanding it. It encourages efficiency of storytelling, attaching important character elements to import world-building concepts so that both can be introduced together, which is a good idea when it works and a bad one when it doesn’t.
And it doesn’t work here as is clear from the first voice over from Kaulder’s long-time helper Dolan (Caine) explaining the rules of the secret world of magic the two of them police which the film doesn’t have time to show because of an extended action open. The lack of cohesion in action, character and story is Witch Hunter’s most consistent feature such that most characters’ dialogue is entirely expositional explaining some new wrinkle in the rules of the world without any sort of emotional connection to it.
They’re not helped by the fact that much of Witch Hunter is a fantastic police procedural, which requires its own steady diet of expositional information to keep moving forward, as Kaulder pulls out all the stops to find the person who appears to have murdered his old friend.
Diesel himself is immune to a lot of the problems as he gets to sprinkle his statements on how magic works with the odd insightful musing on the very human nature of evil. It’s about as close to characterization as Witch Hunter gets, though it’s stymied by an inability to engage with Kaulder’s extended past because it is directly tied to the mystery of who attacked his friend.
Looking for clues from his first encounter with the Witch Queen (Engelbrecht), Kaulder tracks down a Dreamwalker (Leslie), a witch who specializes in entering someone else’s mind and rummaging around in it. In the hands of the films writer’s what should be at most a single sentence of explanation becomes the essence of the character, her dark secret which when exposed means nothing to the audience because regular people have no personal experience with being Dreamwalkers.
The rest of the cast is in very much the same boat trying to make the material sound affecting, but the characters are what they do and no more which makes them conduits for the plot and nothing else.
If the ideas behind the world were compelling enough, either unique or extremely primal, they could make up for those shortcomings or at least hide them during initial viewings. But they’re not. It’s a secret world of magic and magic users lying just beneath everyday Manhattan with a council that makes the rules and some sort of helping hand from the Catholic Church: no one involved seems interested in stretching the established parameters of urban fantasy.
It’s also a noticeably empty world; there is seldom anyone in a given scene but Diesel and one or two other actors. It enhances the unreality of Witch Hunter’s world while decreasing its scale – it’s hard to be epic when there are only three or four people around at any given time.
Nor are the set pieces themselves, what few there are, particularly memorable. Occasionally it coalesces into a decent meld of world building and action, primarily in the first encounter with warlock Belial (Ólafsson) at the Dream Bar, but like the other action moments it’s over before it’s begun.
The one exception is the extended finale as Kaulder delves into the ancient Witch prison to face his ancient enemy once and for all. Set in the caverns beneath Kaulder’s church headquarters where prisoners are kept it is a dark and dank finale where little can be seen and what can doesn’t seem worth it, filled with some of the film’s weakest visual effects and wire work.
The Last Witch Hunter isn’t terrible by any stretch of the imagination and there are moments when it overcomes its worst instincts to give a glimpse of the movie the filmmakers were probably trying to make. Diesel can hold a screen and he is completely comfortable with Kaulder’s informed outlook of urbanity and competence and odd humanism. But there’s a balance which must be found to make one of these things work, or lacking that at least either the fantasy or character elements must shine through. When both sides fail (increasingly the case as more and more fantasy is brought to the screen), the basic skeleton of the story is at obvious odds with itself and not all of the charismatic actors in the world will keep the outcome from feeling like it lasts forever.
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