Legend has it that the seventh son of a seventh son is born with certain special powers, which, in Joseph Delaney’s “Wardstone Chronicles” fantasy-lit series, include the ability to see supernatural beings and, potentially, to kill witches.
But given the unusually long gestation period for Universal’s film adaptation, “Seventh Son,” which opens in the U.S. Friday, nearly a year later than originally planned, one shouldn’t be all that surprised to discover some pretty significant birth defects, among them a tired plot, some very unspecial effects and a pair of grotesquely uneven performances from Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.
It’s another example of how Universal, the studio once responsible for the town’s finest monster movies (“Dracula,” “The Wolf Man”), now churns out ugly, cumbersome monstrosities (“Dracula Untold,” “The Wolfman”). In what appears to be medieval British Columbia, Bridges plays Gregory, a witch-hunting “spook” who once belonged to an elite group of knights, all of whom have either died or yielded to the darkness. His apprentices don’t fare much better, as evidenced by an opening scene that doesn’t work out so great for “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington; nor does it bode well for future apprentice Tom Ward (Ben Barnes).
For decades, Gregory has grappled with a witch queen named Mother Malkin, made potentially interesting by the casting of Moore, whose performance is then rendered too difficult to appreciate by a thick cloud of CGI noise as she constantly shape-shifts to and from dragon form. Mother Malkin derives power from the once-a-century Blood Moon, whose return is a mere week away, just enough time for Gregory to find and train a replacement assistant.
We meet Gregory drunk in a saloon, a recycled version of the half-soused shootout that serves as Doc Holliday’s introduction in “Tombstone.” Bridges is on his own weird wavelength here, his surfer-dude accent half buried beneath a pronounced underbite and a deep, indistinct growl.
It takes two-time Oscar nominee Sergei Bodrov (“Prisoner of the Mountains,” “Mongol”) and editors Jim Page and Paul Rubell nearly an hour to find the film’s rhythm. Fully 10 minutes pass before we meet Tom, toiling away on his pig farm. Older and far blander than we might expect, the lad has strange, almost epileptic visions of things to come, conveyed through odd montages that feel awkwardly inserted before disappearing entirely just when we’d expect them to become more important. Mostly, he sees witches, including a young one, Alice (fittingly beguiling Swedish actress Alicia Vikander), who will play a vital role in the film’s final showdown.
Ultimately, “Seventh Son” has the cluttered feel of an overdesigned, underconceived fantasy epic. It’s a rare alchemy by which these would-be franchises actually work. For every “The Princess Bride,” there are countless misfires in which the ingredients seem to be there, but the chemistry never sparks (e.g. “Stardust,” “The Mortal Instruments,” “The Golden Compass”).
Here, it’s downright uncomfortable to watch an actor as good as Bridges fumbling lame one-liners, while Barnes and Vikander struggle to generate the sort of heat required to accept them as star-crossed lovers from incompatible lines. Given the fine past work of its many parents, there was clearly potential here, but as delivered, “Seventh Son” amounts to nothing short of a creative miscarriage.
‘Seventh Son’ – 1 star
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense fantasy violence and action throughout, frightening images and brief strong language)
Running time: 1:42
Opens: Friday
