Review

The Last Witch Hunter

Unfortunate viewers who bought tickets for The Last Witch Hunter can pray that the title is right. It's a guarantee there won't be sequels. No known follow-up exists for The Last Airbender.

Actually, even if Summit Entertainment and star Vin Diesel had been salivating for the franchise opportunities this film might have offered, that anticipation ended once somebody got a look at the final cut of the film.

The Last Witch Hunter

74 Cast: Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Rena Owen, Julie Englebrecht, Michael Caine

Director: Breck Eisner

Rating: PG-13, for sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images

Running time: 106 minutes

The Last Witch Hunter actually got off to a promising start when Cory Goodman's original screenplay earned a spot on the 2010 Blacklist, which honors the most promising unproduced scripts. Without having read the screenplay myself, it's tempting to think it all went downhill after screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (the minds behind the forgettable and forgotten Dracula Untold) got their hands on it.

The title character is intriguing enough for better writers to develop. Kaulder (Vin Diesel) may be the last of his kind, so it's a good thing he has gotten 800 years of practice. He killed the Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht) back in the Middle Ages and has spent the interim making sure malevolent witches and warlocks suffer if they break their promise to do no harm to people.

It's not as if Kaulder likes his job. The Queen cursed him to immortality just before her demise because, having lost his wife and daughter, he was the only one willing to risk his life to end hers. Working with a secret branch of the Catholic church and with a council of witches bound to honor a truce with humans, Kaulder has spent the last several centuries as a peacemaker instead of a spectral assassin.

That changes when an especially powerful witch murders the priest (Michael Caine) who assists him on his missions. The clergyman's replacement (Elijah Wood) and a reluctant witch (Rose Leslie) have to find the genocidal coven master before he or she puts an end to humanity.

Actually, if the witch wanted all humans to suffer or die, she'd force them to watch The Last Witch Hunter the way Alex watched films in A Clockwork Orange. In its final form, the mythology is so garbled it's hard to determine why plagues of insects, rampaging vines and roaring blazes happen.

And even more difficult to give a rip.

Yes, magic (or "magik") can make the impossible happen, but even practitioners of the dark arts are bound to rules that can backfire on them if they defy the edicts. People get old instantly or swallowed by vegetation because director Breck Eisner seems overly aware of his special effects budget.

Diesel and the supporting cast struggle to figure out what sort of characters they're playing, so viewers never grow to love or loathe them. It's a little too easy for even great actors like Michael Caine to get upstaged by the Gothic scenery and the hyperactive CGIs.

MovieStyle on 10/23/2015

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