It’s a fairy good effort from Dame Judi!
THIS unwieldy mash-up of the Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings films could be mischievously dubbed Lord Of The Potters, or Harry Of The Rings, were if not for conspicuous streaks of Star Trek in there, too.
Let’s just say it feels highly derivative from the moment, early on, that we meet Josh Gad’s Mulch Diggums, a hairy rascal who acts as a kind of whispering narrator. He could easily be a close cousin of Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid in the Potter series.
I haven’t read Eoin Colfer’s bestselling books myself, not even to my children when they were younger, but I know enough about them to be aware that Kenneth Branagh’s long-awaited film adaptation fudges much of what gave the stories their appeal. I suspect true fans will cry ‘Fowl’.
Here, Artemis (Ferdia Shaw) is a 12-yearold genius (‘When he was ten, he cloned a goat,’ Diggums tells us) who shares his home on the coast of Ireland with his father, Artemis Sr (Colin Farrell) and their faithful retainer, Domovoi Butler (Nonso Anozie).
Artemis Sr is an antiques dealer, but is also thought to be a criminal mastermind responsible for the theft of such priceless artefacts as the Rosetta Stone and the Book of Kells.
Artemis knows him only as a kindly, loving dad, but Artemis Sr is clearly mixed up in something fishy because he gets kidnapped by malevolent fairies who want the magical Aculos, a kind of glowing pine cone, which he has pinched, and keeps hidden in Fowl Manor. With it, they can destroy all of humankind.
Meanwhile, the good fairies are after the Aculos too. They are led by Commander Root (Dame Judi Dench, acting her socks off despite a hairdo that brings John Bercow distractingly to mind, and an accent that meanders between Limerick and Somerset).
All this plunges Artemis into a magical world his father has always shielded him from.
Can his preternatural intelligence keep him safe, and help him outsmart the forces of evil? That’s one burning question.
Another is whether Artemis Fowl will be, as Disney hopes, the new Harry Potter. Paradoxically, that’s precisely the problem. He needs an identity of his own, and this film doesn’t really provide it.