Fe-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of yet another classic fairytale being repackaged for a modern audience…
Continuing that trend, Jack the Giant Slayer delivers a surprisingly fun and occasionally inventive retelling with heavy reliance on monstrous CGI (in more ways than one) but with a sense of playfulness often missing from such blockbusters.
A blend of two fairytales “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Jack the Giant Killer,” the film exists in a world where an ancient war has raged between humans and the giants who live above them. We specifically follow a young farmhand named Jack (Nicholas Hoult) who swaps his father’s horse (not a cow as we’re used to hearing) for a bag of magic beans.
Unwittingly he gets one of the beans wet causing a giant beanstalk to sprout up through the middle of his house to the land of the giants who have sworn revenge on the King who banished them. Jack must then become a hero and rescue the Princess (Eleanor Tomlinson) who has accidentally been taken up to where the giants live.
What could have been a ridiculous tale that took itself too seriously is in fact a pleasingly light and frothy piece of entertainment. It’s nothing too demanding on the brain, to put it politely, but there’s an honest good old-fashioned sense of fun about it all.
Director Bryan Singer, still best known for crime thriller The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men movies, goes all out here as he gleefully plays around in the sandpit of bedtime storytelling, revelling in the scale and effects he has at his disposal (the movie cost almost $200 million).
The screenplay by Darren Lemke, Dan Studney and regular Singer collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, while not exactly as tight as it should be nevertheless nicely mixes different storytelling sensibilities which allows the film to wink at the audience as much as it puts on a rather unique kind of spectacle. There’s just something fascinating and thrilling about seeing giants, brought to life rather magnificently, running full-force in battle along a field, for example. Not all of the CGI works, in fact it’s rather dodgy in many moments where the tiny humans are interacting with the giants, but it’s not enough to derail the film as a whole.
This frankly could have been a disaster, something foreshadowed by reports of reshoots and the film’s release date being pushed back. But it’s saved from that fate by a kind of gung-ho mentality of chucking lots of ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Yes, it’s overly long and has a few too many plot-threads going for its own good (including some nonsense about the history of why the giants obey) but at the end of the day it’s a good bit of jolly spectacle that’s not only aware of its own ridiculousness but embraces it.
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