By Many moons ago, at San Diego Comic Con 2013, my friend and I were sitting through all the panels in the infamous Hall H waiting to get to the Marvel movie panel. One of the panels we sat through showed some footage and brought out the cast for a silly looking fantasy movie called Seventh Son. By the end of that day, I was so tired that all I remembered about it was that Kit Harington seemed really embarrassed to be on the panel talking about it.
Fast forward to two years later, the same friend and I saw Seventh Son over this past weekend.
Seventh Son
Director: Sergey Brodov
Release Date: February 6, 2015
Rating: PG-13
In a world where only men who are the seventh son of seventh sons can learn to fight witches, and witches seem to be all over the place, Seventh Son starts out with a ton of over-dramatic cheese. Master Gregory (Jeff Bridges) and his apprentice, Bradley (Kit Harington), are asked to exorcise a demon out of a young girl. Gregory doesn’t seem too interested, but Bradley drags him along to get the work done.
It turns out it’s not a demon possessing the girl at all; it’s a horribly evil witch named Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore). Malkin had been sealed away years ago by Gregory, but thanks to something called a Blood Moon, she’s back and is getting stronger than ever. So just when you think the story is about to get going, Gregory lets Bradley die by Malkin’s hand, and he’s out an apprentice.
Enter Tom Ward (Ben Barnes), a character who’s also a seventh son of a seventh son. He grew up on a tiny island with his family, and dreams of doing more than just feeding pigs. Gregory shows up at the island, throws some gold at Tom’s parents, and the two of them are off on their adventure.
This is the moment when the pace of this movie comes to a screeching halt. Yes, there’s action, but none of it’s all that interesting or engaging. Tom and Gregory have banter that’s supposed to be funny and cutting, I guess, but a lot of it just feels like it’s written by a fifteen year old running his first Dungeons & Dragons campaign. There’s a lot of cutting back and forth between what Tom and Gregory are up to, and what Malkin and her evil lackies are doing, but it never feels like anything is happening because the movie just plods along, taking its time to make any progress.
Despite the fact that Tom wants to learn how to fight witches and “things of the dark,” he doesn’t really seem to listen to anything that Gregory says. When told not to fall in love with a witch, the moment he sees one getting carried off to be burned in a very Monty Python-ish scene, he saves her and immediately falls in love with her. The romance between Tom and the witch, whose name is Alice (Alicia Vikander), is so shoe-horned in it’s painful. Tom just doesn’t really seem to care about anything that he’s doing, regardless of what the consequences might be.
But if I delve any more into the story, we’ll get into spoiler territory, so instead… let’s talk about the actors themselves.
First of all, Jeff Bridges has been in a lot of other movies that are generally good. I totally loved him in True Grit, for example. He was funny, but he also knew when to be serious, and his character in that was believable either way. In Seventh Son, however, he doesn’t really seem to know how to handle Gregory. The character is written like he’s supposed to be this crusty old spook/witch-killer/whatever you want to call him, but then there are other times when he’s written to be super serious. So because the personality of the character isn’t very clear, Jeff Bridges just kind of… does whatever he wants, which also involves talking like he’s got a mouthful of peanut butter.
Julianne Moore is another actor who I usually like, but again, she didn’t seem to know what to do with Malkin. It was obvious in a lot of scenes that she wanted to get really campy and silly, but the other actors were all so dull that she just decided to be boring, too.
The worst one out of the main cast, though, was Ben Barnes. If this movie had been made a year or so after it actually was, I think he and Kit Harington would’ve had their roles swapped. While I don’t think Kit is a great actor, I think he could’ve made Tom a bit more likeable than Ben Barnes did. Either way, the two of them are pretty much interchangeable in this movie.
Also, why was Djimon Honsou in this movie? He can do so much better.
At the end of the day, Seventh Son is a nonsensical, plodding adventure. This is better suited to being watched on TV with your friends so you can heckle it than in a movie theater.