Jack The Giant Slayer: Movie Review

Jack The Giant Slayer: Movie Review

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor, Ian McShane, Eleanor Tomlinson, Ewen Bremner
Director: Bryan Singer

Fe, fi, fo, fum. Another fairy-tale film this way does come.

In the latest to be released (after Oz: The Great and Powerful, Snow White), Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy, Warm Bodies) plays Jack, who, as a young boy, was enthralled by the stories of the giants in the heavens above.

He's not alone in that admiration of all things tall as Princess Isabelle (Tomlinson) is also fascinated by the fairy tale.

The pair meet in later life when Jack is a young farmhand and Princess Isabelle is, well, a princess. Jack's sent to the market to sell off the horse and cart to ensure there's money for the farm to survive. However, he comes back with only a couple of magic beans - as the story goes.

Those beans are also being sought as well by Stanley Tucci's toothy Roderick, who's determined to enslave the giants and use them to wreak havoc below.

But when Jack accidentally drops a bean in his cabin, while fending off a visit from the princess, it sprouts a beanstalk re-connecting the humans to the Giant kingdom - and unleashing all manner of complications as well as a potential for war.

Jack The Giant Slayer (aka Jack The Giant Killer) is a perfectly fine, adequately re-telling of a tale so familiar to many. Bryan Singer manages to slightly subvert your expectations of what you may believe the fairy tale is telling by bringing a final section battle sequence to life that challenges anything proffered up by the Lord of the Rings series (albeit on a slightly smaller scale). He's also fond of the work done by his FX team, throwing in numerous swirling shots of the Giants' world to show off the scale of what's ahead and what's been achieved.

But he doesn't lose sight of the human side of the story; Hoult is warm and affable (if a little wet) as Jack; Tomlinson is a little wishy washy as the princess / romantic lead; Tucci is (as previously mentioned) toothy and a bit hammy as the villain of the piece (as is an OTT foppish Ewen Bremner as his snickering buffoonish No2) and Ewan McGregor rocks out a terribly stilted Obi-Wanesque accent as the head of the guard. Some dignity is provided by Ian McShane's king, but to be honest, they're all second fiddle to the FX and the Giants themselves (which inexplicably all speak with Irish accents)

All in all, Jack The Giant Slayer delivers more on its Less Stalk, More Action (as one wag has coined it) and presents a perfectly enjoyable, if entirely forgettable and relatively unoriginal, family movie. If anything, you could say it's a case of Fe, Fi, Ho-Hum.

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