THE LAST WITCH HUNTER

The Last Witch Hunter

The character Vin Diesel plays in The Last Witch Hunter, Kaulder, is purportedly based on a Dungeons and Dragons character he played for years (also a witch hunter). As far as vanity projects go, this has to count as the most tremendously humble. I’m not sure what level of social acceptability D&D has reached in these times of superheroes and swordwielding TV shows, but I know what kind of psoriasis-on-your-horn-rims hard-core nerdery it represented when I started playing it, and I can only assume that, relative to whenever the almost 50-year-old Diesel started playing it, I would have seemed like a wavy-haired quarterback with a +13 Guitar of Having Sex With All of the Cheerleaders. To persevere to the point of introducing your witch-killing sword on a big screen in a Hollywood release is an act of will few can truly fathom.

And just so we’re clear here: we are talking about the old-school, sixCheeto-speckled-virgins-aroundyour-disappointed-father’s-cardtable-in-the-basement D&D, the kind of D&D where you actually start saying things like “Verily, my mage Thraesun surveys his bag of holding …” and spend time bartering with Gnomish shop keeps, not this half-assed hand-holding

The Last Witch Hunter amounts to watching someone else play D&D

computer-rendered hack-and-slash garbage that replaces space marines with guys in horned helmets. It used to be about character building, goddammit, and … oh God I belong in a home, don’t I?

Where was I? Right: anyway, just because you are a world-famous minor mountain of a man who can feasibly pass as the fantasy character you have loved your entire adult life doesn’t mean you should actually subject the rest of us to it. There are some fun and lived-in little bits of a dark fantasy world sprinkled through The Last Witch Hunter — the witches’ powers, for instance, are evoked by the icky creepy-crawliness and the intertwined beauty of nature — but every time it starts to feel like we’re actually walking in it, Diesel pokes his head in to begin explaining the mythology and mechanics of all his centuries of witchhuntin’, and it feels like we’re listening to someone read the Dungeon Master’s Guide like a storybook.

It probably doesn’t help that, true to most D&D characters, Kaulder is a melange of fantasy tropes haphazardly rolled into a ball and hurled at a story. A medieval warrior who went to kill the witch queen and stop the plague, he was cursed with eternal life, and has spent the hundreds of years since helping a dodgy religious order maintain the peace between the now mostly benign witches and humans.

Present-day Kaulder is a stewardess-romancing, sports-car-driving consummate bad ass who is drawn back into the nefarious magic world when one of his human assistants (Michael Caine, still doing anything for a cheque) ends up suspiciously dead. There are a gaggle of others around, most notably Rose Leslie as a good witch and Elijah Wood as a shady priest, each just kind of there until Diesel is kind enough to explain their role in both the mythos and the plot, at which point they fulfill their one purpose and get back to admiring how badass he is during one of the blurry, incoherent fight scenes.

I say from some experience that there’s a lot to recommend in a good ol’ game of Dungeons and Dragons, especially if you have a little imagination. There’s absolutely no reason to sit down and watch someone else do it, though, which is — several million dollars of computer effects notwithstanding — all The Last Witch Hunter really amounts to. ∂