There is a whole sub-community of movie executives who will farewell their Hollywood careers when, as most assuredly it will, this film plummets like a clumsy giant out of the sky on its general release to the public.
For, unlike the last film I can remember being this wretched (Danny Glover’s Age of the Dragons) Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer was not released straight to video, its producers having first been taken out and shot.
Here rather more is at stake, at least if the fanfare that accompanied its preview screening is anything to go by. They erected a 20 foot high climbing wall outside the cinema to mark the launch. Since the screening took place in Leicester Square on St. Patrick’s Day amidst a throng of drunken Irish revellers, this was a misjudgment all of its own.
Other than Age of the Dragons (and, let’s face it, “Moby Dick. On land. With dragons. Starring Vinnie Jones” is quite a benchmark), I can’t remember a film quite so bankrupt in its basic concept. The idea seems to have been to take anything of note in the fantasy genre of recent times – there are hat tips to The Princess Bride, The Hobbit, How to Train Your Dragon, Beowulf, Prometheus, Immortals among many others – and to stitch them together in the expectation that it might all fly. Jack the Giant Slayer therefore has a cloying excess just about everything – everything, that is, except wit.
Wit is fully absent without official leave. Great Scott, it’s a pantomime! Jack and the Beanstalk begs for double entendre! Its bizarre omission calls to mind Danny McBride’s childishly excellent Your Highness, a film almost entirely comprised of innuendo and which, like no other, illustrates just how redemptive a penis joke can be.
In the meantime, the story is a hodgepodge of English fairy tales. Despite being named for “Jack the Giant Killer” (“killer” nixed because the focus group didn’t like the word “killer” and didn’t understand the concept “synonym”) this is mostly a reprise of Jack & the Beanstalk. Only better, I suspect its screenwriting collective thought (this is a collective whose collected output, by the way, is enough to induce dizziness, cold sweats and vomiting).
And of course it isn’t better. It can’t be. Jack & The Beanstalk is an archetypal fairy story with the kernel of a decent drama, but in no reasonable man’s conception could it stretch for two hours (not, at least, without a cross-dressing Widow Twanky somewhere along the way). So the collective has drowned out the elemental aspects of the story with additional tropes and dog-eared routines of the idiom, whilst egregiously forgetting the all-important transvestitism.
Now excuse a digression into literary theory, but in this fairy story there is a hero (Jack), a monster (one giant), a perfidious interlocutor who, through shortsightedness, meanness, hubris or stupidity provides the impetus for the hero to be uncaged (a stepmother who angrily throws away the beans for which Jack has credulously traded his cow). It is simple stuff, and has a whopping great cock of metaphor quite literally rooted right in the middle of everything, yet the moral of the story is unusual for a “hero overcoming the monster” story: be careful what you wish for. Sometimes your vaulting ambition can come back to bite you. (Are you listening, Bryan Singer?) Here the screenplay entirely futzes that simple premise. There are several candidates for villain – an entire tribe of Ulstermen giants (in a land and at the top of a beanstalk, by the way, so graphically rendered as to compel close literal examination of a metaphor which isn’t up to such scrutiny. Wouldn’t everyone have, like, noticed a huge landmass floating in the sky? Wouldn’t it always be dark below? Wouldn’t things spontaneously fall off it from time to time (as indeed they start to once the action gets underway)? Would the land below really look just like the Home Counties in summertime?
The screenwriters have invented a backstory for the giants which further compromises the fable. They’re subject to a mythical ring (or crown, depending on your hat size), to the bearer of which they must pledge automatic fealty. This allows further candidate for supreme Villain when dastardly Roderick (Stanley Tucci), one of the King’s men, gets hold of the ring, waves it at a horde of onrushing giants, and they all at once down to him without further discussion.
And just as the giants seem improbably captive of one little midget, Bryan Singer seems captive of, or at least captivated by, his special effects department. The film is in 3D, a fad which elsewhere seems thankfully passé, is lit darkly anyway, and they have made the curious decision to entirely animate the giants (per Beowulf, rather than augmenting live performances per Lord of the Rings) using quite dated rendering technology. Perhaps we have reached the limit what the CGI wizards can do, and there is hope for the Screen Actors Guild after all. In any case Bill Nighy isn’t recognisable as the Giant with the Belfast accent and the extra head.
Meanwhile, our anaemic young hero Jack (Nicholas Hoult) does his best, but has no obvious fibre and only an anaemic princess (Eleanor Tomlinson) to win over, whom the giants are (specifically, for some reason) hell-bent on eating (notwithstanding that such a skinny little whelp would, to a giant, have the size and consistency of a cockroach). We arrive at a final dramatic conclusion at the Castle (I know, I know, what castle?) wherein King (what King?) Brahmwell (Ian McShane), in possibly the most woeful piece of miscasting in motion picture history, is obliged to partake in a twenty minute tug of war with a giant cabbage patch doll, while dressed in a suit of armour made of solid, 24 carat gold lamé that even Julian Clary wouldn’t be seen dead in. McShane, to his credit, looks singularly unamused, adopting the expression of a candid camera victim immediately prior to being let in on the gag.
As of the time of writing the film hadn’t recouped half its estimated production costs in a month or so of general American release. Thus I hope Ian McShane and his cohort of celebrated English actors got paid in hard currency in advance – because the merchandising rights ain’t going to be worth Jack.
Jack the Giant Slayer is in cinemas 22nd March 2013.
Director: Bryan Singer
Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Ewan McGregor, Ian McShane, Stanley Tucci, Bill Nighy
Runtime: 114 min
Country: USA
Film Rating: 
