An average movie

Next week, I will probably see ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ (apparently, it is already a massive success at the box-office) and, in the meantime, I thought I could see Bryan Singer’s previous directing effort. Well, after ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘Superman Returns’, it was another flop for Singer and after watching the damned thing, I can’t say it really deserved better. Basically, it is another modernizing of a traditional fairy tale and with those, it is always a tricky gamble. At least, it remains a pretty cool story and, I have to admit it, they almost got it right. Indeed, Nicholas Hoult was a fairly good choice to play the lead and I liked the way that it didn’t take hours before they grew the beanstalk. Unfortunately, the rest of the story didn’t work very well. Indeed, it felt as if they didn’t trust Hoult to carry the movie by himself so they added Ewan McGregor to the mix which was really distracting. In my opinion, that was the major issue here, the way the whole thing was rather unbalanced and unfocused. Indeed, there was a hero but also a courageous and loyal knight played by a major actor, there were the giants who should be sufficient as villain but also some guy plotting to rule the world. And I won’t mention the wall-to-wall CGI which was quite often pretty ugly. To conclude, even though the whole thing was rather half-backed, it still remain a neat story and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre but don’t expect anything really amazing.

6/10