Seventh Son

Directed by Sergey Bodrov. Written by Charles Leavitt, Steven Knight, Matt Greenberg, and Joseph Delaney (novel “The Spook’s Apprentice”). Starring Jeff Bridge (Master Gregory), Ben Barnes (Tom Ward), Julianne Moore (Mother Malkin), and Alicia Vikander (Alice).

Bottom line: I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, but Seventh Son might even top R.I.P.D. as one of the worst. Do not see this movie.

.5/4

The movie opens with Master Gregory (Bridges) hammering the last nails into a steel grate that covers the entrance to a cave in a mountain. We hear a woman yelling the name “Gregory!” The camera slowly pans as we see a computer graphics aided time-lapse sequence which stops as the moon becomes a blood moon. The blood moon revitalizes the dragon-woman who is trapped in the cage and she escapes. The rest of the movie is spent with Bridges hunting the she-dragon-witch, Mother Malkin (Moore) with the help of his new apprentice. To become his apprentice and then a knight one must be the 7^th son of a 7^th son. Thaaaaat’s how they get the title!

Seventh Son is a terrible movie. The graphics are lame. The dialog is putrid. The story is trite. It’s been a long time since I saw a movie that made me feel anger and disgust while I was watching it. It’s one of those movies that I regret not walking out of.

I’m going to refer to the character as Bridges because I’d rather not call him Gregory. There are few Gregorys in movies and I don’t want to squander one on this miserable character.

I’d like to start out with the villains of the movie, Malkin and her crew: her sister, her niece (the love interest, whose father was a human), a black guy, an Asian guy, a blue mythically-creature guy, and a snake guy. So the villains are strong female characters and minorities who sympathize with the female characters. To contrast we have two “good” witches in the story: the niece and the apprentice’s mother. They are good because they rarely do magic (the niece uses it to appear and disappear when it’s convenient to the plot) and they silently stand behind their respective male partners.

Indeed, one of the worst parts of this movie is the gender politics. Maybe it’s bad because it’s a really subtle scathing commentary about the world; that is, I see it as painful because it’s too real.

Let’s contrast this to the heroes: two white guys and their stupid, ugly (these are their words, mind you), nigh-mute troll assistant. I’ll also add that Bridges literally gives the troll assistant to his apprentice at the end of the movie. I’ll talk about this more in a bit; I’d like to mention a couple of parts of the movie.

Seventh Son is a cheap movie so the plot is minimal. It was based off of a short story or novel called The Spook’s Apprentice. I’d be curious to see how much the film departed from the original story. Well, mildly curious, not enough to actually go check but you know if you have read it, please leave a comment!

There is a love story subplot because that’s always necessary for movies like this. The niece is half-witch but it’s convenient because she’s young and attractive and matches up perfectly with the young attractive half-witch apprentice (his mother was a witch).

The acting is painfully flat. Sure, the writing may have been terrible but there is at least some room for the actors to maneuver. There can be an inkling of feeling. It’s like the delivery in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

With a cheap movie like this, the major draw is for the computer graphics. They aren’t worth it. If that’s what you want, go watch Transformers. Yes, I actually said that. What is the world coming to?

A major problem with the graphics is that in the major action sequences, the camera shakes and moves in such a way that I had trouble parsing the images. That’s a trick, of course, because if you can’t parse it, they don’t actually have to show anything.

I must ask you to not see this. Please. This is a painfully bad movie. Maybe if we abstained from watching painful movies, they won’t make them anymore.