Artemis Fowl
I haven’t seen a lot of promotion for this as it just kind of stumbled onto Disney+ last week. I don’t mind the work of Kenneth Branaugh. I actually really liked the live action Cinderella he made and it really ushered forward an age of live action Disney films that I’ve enjoyed for the most part. Well, with Artemis Fowl I was going in completely blind. The best knowledge I have in the belt, is the fact that this was a book during my childhood, that’s it. Within twenty minutes I was lost and hated it and its sad to say my opinion remained the same at the end.
Artemis Fowl II is a super smart kid whose father gets kidnapped and he must gather resources and allies to rescue him. Along the way he encounters fantastical and magical creatures. The film stars Ferdia Shaw, Colin Farrell, Josh Gad, and Judi Dench. There’s not much else I can say related to the plot of the film because I got lost early on and didn’t care that much. Whatever semblance of a plot there was just didn’t register with me at all.
Sad to say that newcomer Ferdia Shaw is terrible in this. He has bad line delivery and doesn’t bring any life or intrigue into the role. That’s not all his fault as he and everyone else is let down by a terribly incomprehensible script that just shoots itself in the face right away. This only has a running length of 95 minutes, that’s a pretty short film. Yet it feels two hours long. This film is nonsensical and is badly edited action sequences, one after the other with little room for character development or anything to really try to make you care.
I know its not a fair assessment with this year having a freaking pandemic but this is a mid year contender for worst film of the year already. It’s just terribly bad with little to no redemption. Not sure how Branaugh misfired this bad. I’m sure if you don’t know anything about the Artemis Fowl you will be lost and if you like the series you might loathe this. I really hope this is one and done like The Last Airbender. The awfulness of that film actually is comparable to this. A stinking dogpile.
4/10
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