A really uninspiring piece of storytelling, that wastes a lot of potential goods in a really messy fantasy picture that never manages to find a voice or a tonal coherence. Looking at the cast involved you cannot keep yourself from calling this a disappointment, even if its predecessor didn’t really make us wish for this, nor was it a quality film.
Right off the bat you don’t understand what to make of this. The storytelling is way too jumbled and uneven. Whilst I do commend the film for having some nice twists at best and a couple of good characters with a somewhat interesting development, the movie never manages to emerge from mediocrity and keeps treading ground that has been exhaustively covered in the past, to the point that you end up with a collection of too many emotional beats that have almost no gravitas because of how many times you’ve seen them and how ingrained in the genre they are.
The fact is that I repeatedly found the screenplay of the movie quite passable. The overall archs and interlacement of characters is interesting and with the exception of the story missteps mentioned above, there was a valid narrative trying to emerge. Unfortunately, first time director, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan does not manage to make a flowing film out of it. There is no voice or style implemented in here, it all feels so dull and generic, not even when I was trying hard to get absorbed I found something to connect to. The shot choices are really uninspired, it covers the film with a layer of dullness that is really hard to shake off. Moreover, other than some artistically pleasing visual effects, not even the action scenes manage to give the viewer something to stick with. They all happen mechanically, without any real storytelling going on and they are all fast cutting and headache inducing.
The four main actors in the film do deserve the majority of the praise. They all have characters that can’t be really defined as engrossing, but they all have something to tell and thanks to the talent of these people, all of them manage to dig deep into them and bring out at least something to sink your teeth in. They are repeatedly undermined by a messy narrative and a dull pace, yet still find a way to stick out.
Look this isn’t in anyway a terrible film, you probably won’t hear any angry reviews coming out of it and on the contrary, there will be people that find a beat in it. But for the me and probably the majority of the audience, this will just be a forgettable, generic narrative that wasted a good amount of potential.
James's Score: 4/10
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