The story: Immortal Vin Diesel has to kill at witch. Yeah, that's basically it.
What a fascination mess of a movie. It's like the makers truly made an effort to make anything potentially good in the movie worse (even the credits song isn't the best version of Painted Black). It starts off promising but after twenty minutes its highspeed downhill. Pretty much the minute Rose Leslie's character enters the picture (nothing to do with the actress, rather the script).
Acting
Let's start with the actors. Vin Diesel isn't the greatest actor in the world. But the man can in fact act a bit. Nothing oscar worthy but leagues beyond highschool drama. However, somebody has told him during this movie to keep one expression and one expression only. It truly never changes. Fascinating.
Then there's Michael Caine who -without a doubt- has landed the easiest role in his career. He's on his back for half the movie. Elijah Wood then. Well at least I can see what lured him to the part. I assume the script he read was better than what he ended up with. And finally Rose Leslie. She's got some stuff to do but basically you could erase the character altogether.
BTW wasn't that the girl from MTV's scream on the plane? I think so.
Effects
Then the special effects. The movie opted for dark brooding scenes so you don't really see how bad the effects are. This is fine. However, if you got a great fightscene in a city retaken by nature (hello Last of us-ripoff) don't return to the bloody cave to finish the fight there. We had a wonderful set going on. But I guess this one has to be put down to financing. Still anything you can't really show can be saved with some tweaking of the script right?
Script
Which brings me to the script. Somewhere inside its pages there's a diamond in the rough.
It's a shame that the script has been ram shacked to this monstrosity. Now, it doesn't help that essential scenes has been cut short to speed up the movie. Like, for instance, Rose's rescue or the 'dream janking' moment. But of the visual script that remains still a lot of stuff drops like a ton of bricks or simply doesn't make sense. The whole dreamwalker stuff, just placed halfway through the movie. No introduction, just bingo there you have it.
The final twist...hilariously out of place (and extremely illogical when you think about it).
Other examples: The warlock setting fire to the bar without looking what's going on with his captive. Why not shoot the chanting witch in head again? The list goes on and on.
I do have to give credit to one gigantic hurdle the script suffers from from the getgo. Vin Diesel's character Klauser cannot die. Simple as that. So there is never a real sense of danger for him. In the superman movies this is solved by putting Lois Lane in trouble. But here, we don't. At least the creators of this movie realized early on that the only way of making stuff interesting is to make Klauser mortal once more. But -unfortunately- that happens far too late into the movie.
As I said before this movie really is like somebody making an effort to make it worse than it could have been. Which is silly because basically it's Highlander meets Constantine. Two very good movies that did a lot of things right. Why not use that and mix it around? Instead we got a silly forgettable mess. I wonder how much studio involvement went on during production because this movie screams budget cuts and redirection to me.
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