Review of Seventh Son (2014) by Harry W — 04 Nov 2015

Featuring the presence of Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore made Seventh Son sound appealing on the surface, yet the fact that it received overwhelming critical panning left me wondering just how it all went wrong and so I had to find out for myself.

Without giving viewers a second to breathe, Seventh Son immediately hurls viewers into a story which skips way past the idea of established context. We know little about the characters, nothing about the universe and there is little time given to even adjust before we are hurled straight into the narrative conflict. Since we have no chance to establish if there is anything interesting about the characters, viewers are thrown into the deep end of a familiar narrative pre-used by every fantasy film made to capitalize on the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and children's fantasy adventure novels. The intro foreshadows a film which offers nothing to transcend its familiarity, and its accuracy proves to be impeccable because the film is a thoroughly wasteful experience.

But the one thing I will point out is that The Seventh Son plays itself off like a massive joke. The script in Seventh Son can't decide whether it wants to be a legitimate sword and sorcery adventure film or a parody of one. Regardless, director Sergei Bodrov fails to find a way to make it work. The story itself is already generic, and Seventh Son combats that with a screenplay full of jokes. Yet not one of them is funny, there is no comic zing in the atmosphere or the delivery of the actors. As a result, we are left with a film neither legitimate enough to be taken seriously or funny enough to be worthy of cheap thrills for anything else than being viewed in a bad-movie screening night. Much of the film feels reminiscent of the failed adaptation of Eragon (2006) which is reinforced by the presence of Djimon Hounsou, and both films can proudly walk away with the status of being considered among the worst of the year.

Visually, The Seventh Son has nothing to be proud of. Matching the recent trend of expensive yet overblown and but cheap-looking flops, Seventh Son is less a reminder of Lord of the Rings and more a combination of The Legend of Hercules with story elements of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Anyone can tell you that both those were remarkably insufferable experiences, and though The Seventh Son is arguably more coherent than they are, it still remains an overly familiar and poorly designed film. The scenery is as generic as Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, and though the production design itself doesn't feel as cheap there is still the question of how it came from a film with a $90 million budget. The question, but no answer. And the visual effects are not the answer.

The quality of the CGI used is not up to the standard for it to be anything more than painstakingly obvious that Seventh Son makes excessive use of 3D effects. The 3D gimmick is frustrating enough because it makes viewers extremely aware that they are watching a film, but in a film with narrative coherence as low as The Seventh Son it is even worse as there is nothing to compensate for it. It is all too obvious every time one of the characters stands in front of a green screen as thy fail to blend with the background, while the objects being thrown at the screen are all too obvious. And the low quality of the visual effects is made most notorious when the camera pans back to reveal the large scope of cities constructed entirely out of CGI which could not feel more fake if Ed Wood put them on strings. Of course it's physically impossible to dangle a visual simulation from practical strings, but it is less possible to actually believe that anything in the film is slightly realistic.

When it comes to acting, the standard has already been pre-established by everything else and the result is expected.

First off, we have an emotionless protagonist with a lack of distinctive charm. There is nothing memorable about the actor who took on the lead role, and as I write this his name fails to come to mind. I barely even recall his face because he was so lifeless that he blended in with the scenery around him easily, being merely another generic stock character disguised as some kind of hero. Of course I have to look up his name for the sake of the review, but as I point my criticism at the actor that goes by the title of Ben Barnes I can proudly say that I don't expect to ever see him in anything again. If he does anything then that will be thoroughly impressive because his lifeless effort in Seventh Son.

Were there any hope of taking Seventh Son seriously Jeff Bridges would be a bigger burden as it is clearly a miscast role for him, yet the tonal inconsistency and lack of charm in the other actors ensure that he is quintessentially the best part of the film. And though I say that, it's nothing to be proud of. Though John Gregory has the appearance of a half-assed attempt at Gandalf, he has the attitude of a combination of Vitruvius from The Lego Movie and The Dude from The Big Lebowski. Because of that, it is impossible to take him seriously from the moment he enters the screen. And when he engages in a comically-oriented combat sequence with another swordsman, this establishes that his presence in Seventh Son is one big joke. Soon after the gimmick completes its cycle, the narrative pretentiously expects viewers to let it go back to being serious without any repercussions. But it's too late, the damage is done. Jeff Bridges inability to escape his naturally funny nature does manage to create comic relief for Seventh Son which stands out as both its central highlight and a painful reminder of its lack of atmospheric comprehension.

Julianne Moore won an Academy Award the year Seventh Son came out, and for a completely different film. In the low-budget Still Alice, she carried the entire film on her shoulders with a beautiful performance which just came so naturally to her. In the overblown Seventh Son, she hides behind cheap visual effects that turn her into an animated dragon and makeup that makes her look like Robert Blake in Lost Highway. We all know she gave it her all in Still Alice because it claimed her an overdue award, but it must have come at the expense of her giving anything in Seventh Son. I don't blame her because she adheres to the conventional stereotype imposed on her by such a pathetic narrative as best she can, I'm just saying that the quality of this effort is the complete opposite of her effort in Still Alice. Seventh Son is not a film she can boast about, which is interesting considering that many poor films still manage to find audience solace in the quality of her presence. Seventh Son is just so bad around her that it cannot be one of them, and that is a true shame.

So thanks to minimal production values, an inappropriately comedic atmosphere and a narrative blunted by familiarity, Seventh Son is a dreary and creativity-free waste of time which can only find momentary lapses of success in the presence of Jeff Bridges being so unfunny that he is slightly funny at times.