Off to see the wizard
Seventh Son It was 17 years ago now, difficult though that may be to believe, that an olive-robed Julianne Moore stepped toward Jeff Bridges, his brow puckered, and described her art as “strongly vaginal,” in Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski. Moore approaches Bridges once again early in Sergei Bodrov’s new fantasy film Seventh Son. Perhaps, you feel, some residue of that former encounter’s humour will survive here, a faded ember of the Coens’ wit rekindled by the reunion.
But no. Moore, here reduced to the indignity of some sort of ambiguously powerful witch-dragon hybrid, lobs big CGI fireballs around a big CGI castle as Bridges, who “tends to” precisely such witch-dragons by trade, mumbles and sneers his way through a badly choreographed defence.
Seventh Son is a very bad film, to be sure. Although I confess it is, at least for the moment, memorably ridiculous. John Gregory (Bridges) stars as revered wizard-type, regrettably and quite inexplicably called a “spook,” who potters around a rote mountains-andforests fantasy land, or perhaps that ought to be “realm,” supping ale and laying waste to irascible demons, as one does. After the grisly death of his apprentice ( Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington, in a pre-fame ap- pearance that is the film’s most dated fixture) at the hands of Moore’s fire-breathing witchdragon villainess, Gregory calls upon a riverside mother played by Olivia Williams, who among a cast too good to have sunk to this level seems the only one to have reached that conclusion before filming had begun.
Williams sleepily hands over to Gregory the youngest and most conventionally handsome of her seven sons, Tom Ward, played by Ben Barnes, and the two set off together fulfil a destiny that is only very vaguely described. Motivation is a curious notion here. Why it is “the seventh son of a seventh son” in particular who must be recruited by Gregory, for instance, is never explained, but Tom goes gamely along after a moment’s persuasion anyway.
This is all quite familiar. Seventh Son has the reheated quality of fantasy leftovers, like a dry turkey sandwich the morning after an ample Tolkienesque feast. It has ogres and dragons and dazzling grey-brick castles with mile-high spires. But they feel selected rather than thought through, picked up and plugged in rather than truly conceived. That lack makes Seventh Son fatally weightless. Fantasy needs to be grounded in an obsessive and fertile imagination. You get a sense here that nobody in the production thought as hard about the material as those watching and wondering what went wrong. Σ