Diesel’s vanity project not worth watching
The character Vin Diesel plays in The Last Witch Hunter is purportedly based on a Dungeons & Dragons character he played for years (also a witch hunter).
As vanity projects go, this has to count as the most 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 hardcore nerdery it represented when I started playing it.
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 subject the rest of us to it. There are some fun and lived-in bits of a dark fantasy world sprinkled through The Last Witch Hunter, 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 his centuries of witch-hunting. 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 mix 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 witches and humans. Present-day Kaulder is a stewardess-romancing, sports-car-driving consummate badass drawn back into the nefarious magic world when one of his human assistants (Michael Caine) ends up suspiciously dead.
There are others around, most notably Rose Leslie as a good witch and Elijah Wood as a shady priest, each there just until Diesel can explain their roles in the mythos and the plot, at which point they fulfil 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 there’s a lot to recommend a good old game of D&D, especially if you have a little imagination. But there’s absolutely no reason to sit down and watch someone else do it.