Movie review: The Last Witch Hunter? Hope so

Vin Diesel’s dark new adventure is an an extravaganza of gloomy fantasy and ordinary special effects, writes Jay Stone

The Last Witch Hunter

Starring: Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood

Directed by: Breck Eisner

Rating: 2½ stars out of 5

Running time: 106 minutes

By Jay Stone

The dark Vin Diesel adventure, optimistically named The Last Witch Hunter, is an extravaganza of gloomy fantasy and ordinary special effects. These mostly involve twisting tree roots that spring inauthentically from the depths of history to entangle the various leprous witches who are dedicated — for no apparent reason except pure devilry — to bringing death and destruction, not to mention derivative cinema, to mankind.

The most spectacular special effect is, as usual, Vin Diesel. Nearly 20 years into a career as our least defined action hero, he continues to combine a beautifully modulated growl — Diesel’s best performance may still be as the voice of the clanking hero in 1999’s Iron Giant — with a lumpish physique. With his broad shoulders and melting features, he looks as though he was molded from mud and left to dry in the heat of several Hollywood franchises.

Diesel plays Kaulder, whom we meet in a dark prologue set 800 years in the past — so long ago that he has hair and one of those lumberjack beards sported by members of professional baseball teams that didn’t make it past round one of the playoffs — where he is hunting the witches that caused the Black Plague. Kaulder and some fellow Vikings tromp through a CGI forest saying things like, “She will never really perish till her heart beats its last,” which doesn’t actually differentiate her from the rest of us, but does have that ringing cadence of the epic.

In any event, the witch is vanquished amid a flock of exciting flies, and Kaulder is cursed with eternal life. This brings us to present-day New York City where he has already spent several lifetimes capturing bad witches — who come in all forms, from lithe young women with disastrous skin conditions to mad Irishmen who rant like St. Patrick’s Day drunks — and bringing them before a witches’ council for punishment. There are also good witches in this formula, which is explained in voice-over by none other than Michael Caine, slumming as a Catholic priest who is a “dolan,” or assistant, to the witch hunter. He’s a member of a secret group called the Rose and Axe, yet another Hollywood invention in an apparent campaign to make Catholicism into a kind of martial Rosicrucianism, but with more money. At times, The Last Witch Hunter is like The Da Vinci Code Goes To Salem.

Caine’s dolan runs into a spot of bother involving another Viking, this one a witchy, bearded giant called Belial (Olafur Darri Olafsson, who apparently comes by his persona honestly). To save him, Kaulder must find the secrets of his own past. He’s accompanied by a feckless replacement Dolan (the feckless Elijah Wood) as well as a “dream walker” witch named Chloe (Rose Leslie) who can stroll among Kaulder’s memories. These come in two sorts: tree roots that spring inauthentically from the depths of history to entangle leprous witches, and sunny fields of memory of a wife and loving daughter, accouterments that frequently accompany action heroes who need some humanizing before they go off to bash the next villain.

“There are shades of evil everywhere,” Kaulder growls, although that hardly accounts for the film’s dizzying host of villains, confounding witch lore and breakneck racing from one poorly-lit spiritual hotbed to the next. Some of the stops are fun — Isaach De Bankole is spooky as Max, a blind baker who casts a spell over his cupcakes so customers can’t see they’re made of ground-up worms — but it’s a second-rate chase. Director Breck Eisner, whose father Michael once ran the Disney studios, doesn’t have an appreciable sense of style beyond showcasing Diesel in his three-quarter coat and black shirt and jerking the camera around a lot when it’s time to strap on the sword and fight eternal evil.

Ho-hum, except that it’s all set up for a sequel, and I wouldn’t bet against it. Vin Diesel is a hard man to kill.

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ReviewThe Last Witch Hunter

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2.5Score

The Last Witch Hunter: Vin Diesel brings his lumpish and gravelly charisma to this dark and pretty ordinary fantasy about an immortal who hunts witches through the ages. The special effects are second-rate and the story is familiar: the movie relies on the public's attraction to Diesel, and its residual affection for Michael Caine, who has a small role as a priest. 2 1/2 stars out of 5 - Jay Stone

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