Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) **/*****
The most interesting thing about Jack the Giant Slayer for me, going into it, was its director, Bryan Singer. After his breakthrough cult hit, The Usual Suspects, in 1995, Singer cemented his position among a new crop of auteurs who were taking Hollywood by storm; guys like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson. More than that though, due to the quality of that crime film, Singer looked to be one of the most promising of this new class of important directors. But, unlike his newfound peers, his career soon took a more commercial direction, and not necessarily for the worse. With his 2000 film, X-Men, he practically started the whole superhero movie craze that’s currently keeping the box office engine of the industry chugging, and with his 2003 followup, X2, he made what is still one of the best superhero movies that we’ve ever seen. But after that his story changed.
Next he jumped ship over to the DC side of the comics coin and made Superman Returns, which became one of the only high profile superhero projects to fail to spawn a sequel of the last ten years. After that he pulled back a bit from his high profile position and made Valkyrie, a WWII film that came and went without anyone much noticing, other than the fact that it generated some minor discussion surrounding the questionable method he used to portray the Germans as being English speakers. Given this career path, and its recent negative trajectory, one can’t help but ask themselves what the motivations Singer had for signing on to direct Jack the Giant Slayer — his first film in five years — were. Given the concept of the film — taking a story people already know and jazzing it up with a glossy aesthetic and a bunch of action — was this project just a result of studio group-think? Did Singer take it on just to make some easy money and to re-establish his place in the industry? And, even if this is the case, seeing as he worked on it with people like his co-writer Christopher McQuarrie and editor/composer John Ottman, people who helped make The Usual Suspects so good, were they able to produce a quality film anyway? Unfortunately, regardless of whatever the motivations for making this movie were, I have to report that they haven’t turned in a work of surprising quality. As a matter of fact, they may have made something so boring that it won’t even manage to make anybody any money either.
Before we get into all of that though, let’s run down what Jack the Giant Slayer is about. We’ve all heard the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” which is about the poor boy who trades his cow for a handful of magic beans, which then grow into a giant beanstalk he climbs until he discovers a giant’s house that’s full of treasures in the heavens. Well, Jack the Giant Slayer is sort of like that, but with a little bit of the old Arthurian “Jack the Giant Killer” flavor thrown in. In this story, Jack (Nicholas Hoult) isn’t a boy, but a teen on the verge of becoming a man. Instead of climbing the vine out of childhood curiosity, this time he’s doing it because there’s a princess (Eleanor Tomlinson) at the top of it, a princess who he’d like to see naked. And when he gets up to the top he doesn’t just find one giant who wants to use his bones to grind grain for bread, he finds a whole army of giants who want to climb down to the Earth and devour the human race. There are a couple of other twists and turns along the way, but now you get the gist.
Let’s address the performances, because this movie actually has a handful of great actors in it, and you shouldn’t think that I’m dismissing it as being uniformly terrible. Hoult recently proved in Warm Bodies that he makes for a relatable protagonist who you can’t help rooting for, and he manages to achieve the same feat here. His character doesn’t get developed much beyond generic hero, but he’s at least a generic hero who you don’t loathe. Tomlinson doesn’t get much to do other than be the generic princess who won’t be told how to live her life but still gets put into peril either, but she’s pretty and she’s able to project warmth, so she also carries her portion of the film’s weight without any problems. The leads here are handicapped for getting such lame characters, but they do their jobs as well as could be expected.
Where Jack the Giant Slayer starts to become better than adequate is in its supporting performances. Ewan McGregor is generally good in everything, even those dreadful Star Wars prequels, and he looks great in a jaunty, turned-up mustache, so when he shows up as the King’s main warrior and right hand man, you can’t help but smile. And now that we’ve mentioned the King, he doesn’t get all that much to do either, but he’s played by Ian McShane, so it’s pretty hard to complain about that bit of casting. Throw in Stanley Tucci as a scheming villain who wants to use the giants and some mystical mumbo-jumbo to take over the world and Ewen Bremner as his witless crony, and there’s enough charisma here to keep you from completely checking out.
The visuals aren’t all that bad either. This isn’t the sort of movie that utilizes visual effects that are groundbreaking or jaw dropping, but it does feature a lot of large scale effects work, and all of it looks at least acceptable. The giants and all of the scale trickery that comes along with them were pulled off well, the beanstalk didn’t look as ridiculous as it could have, and the huge battle sequences took place on a scale that must have cost a decent amount of money to pull off without having them look like video game footage; so that’s something. Singer and his crew even managed to shine as far as production design goes. All of the period costumes, structures, and pseudo-steampunk gadgets the movie employs were clearly well thought out in their design and worked well to help immerse you in this fantasy world.
None of that matters all that much when the story being told is so completely generic and boring though. This is pretty much the most standard save the princess from the tower prison and protect the castle from the invading horde plot that you can get, with very few deviations or twists thrown in along the way. The characters we’re introduced to are either broadly good or broadly evil, and they really have no quirks or personality traits beyond that. None of the characters grow or change, they stay the same people they were when we first met them, and really the entire film is just a matter of killing time before the good guys end up beating the bad guys — which is clearly an inevitability. How long is it going to take? What are the particulars of the situation going to be? Does anyone really care?
And, really, who’s going to care is one of the central questions that one must ask when thinking about Jack the Giant Slayer. Who was this movie supposed to be for in the first place? It’s based on a fairy tale, but it’s certainly not appropriate for kids. It takes all of the whimsy and life lessons of your typical fairy tale and replaces them with brutal violence and beheadings. It chooses spectacle over substance, but its spectacle is just acceptable and not at all impressive, so who really cares? In the end, probably nobody cares, so a year from now there aren’t going to be many filmgoers who even remember that a movie called Jack the Giant Slayer ever existed. Let’s just hope that his next job of returning to the X-Men franchise with X-Men: Days of Future Past is what it takes to get Bryan Singer’s career back on track, because at this point he’s looking like the biggest disappointments to come out of the 90s independent scene, by far.
