#The last witch hunter movie

Escape From New York, for example, boasted a complex production design and a number of practical special effects, but it was made for just $6 million. (Despite its considerable charms, Big Trouble in Little China is ultimately a little too hokey for its own good.)Ĭarpenter wasn’t making ultra-cheap exploitation films, but he didn’t exactly have unlimited funds, either. There are few better examples of this than director John Carpenter’s string of B-movie classics during the 1980s - Escape From New York, The Thing, and They Live. And what almost always distinguishes the best of these sorts of films from low-rent genre junk is a clear, compelling concept - and the ability to both understand that concept’s appeal and then deliver on it. At its heart, it’s really just a genre B-movie, with smaller, simpler ambitions than most effects-driven summer blockbusters. With a reported production budget of about $90 million, The Last Witch Hunter is a reasonably expensive film, but it’s still considerably less expensive than an average studio tentpole release.

#The last witch hunter movie

The Last Witch Hunter had the potential to be a great genre film If a movie where Vin Diesel wears animal skins can't be great, then what can? Lionsgate The underlying problem is that it doesn’t seem to understand the inherent appeal of its own concept. The Last Witch Hunter was never going to be a great movie, but there’s no reason for it to be a terrible one. That’s a bummer, because more witch hunting and witch destroying is exactly what a movie like this needs. Kaulder even acknowledges this sad reality in a quiet moment of reflection at the end of the second act, glumly sighing to a colleague, 'We don’t destroy witches anymore. Instead, he’s more like a witch detective or, worse, a witch parole officer, patrolling known witch hangouts and dutifully checking in to see that the witches under his supervision are following the law, and then hauling them in to be imprisoned by the judicial system when they don’t. Until the last-minute finale, Kaulder does very little that can be legitimately described as witch hunting. The most glaring flaw of all is even more basic: There's not nearly enough witch huntingįollowing the brief introductory sequence, the movie flashes forward to the present, where Kaulder, now a clean-shaven immortal who favors sleek city coats and black button-downs with ridiculously oversize collars, spends his days tracking down witches who’ve broken the truce and delivering them to an organization called the Witch Council, which delivers its judgment and then locks them away in an underground dungeon. But after the opening scene, in which Kaulder - elaborately bearded and clad in macho furry armor, like a Brooklyn bartender who joined the Night’s Watch - leads a band of ancient warriors into a witch’s den to kill off a witch queen, there’s disappointingly little actual witch hunting. The movie stars Vin Diesel as Kaulder, an immortal badass who for 800 years has enforced a truce between humans and witches at the behest of a shadowy group known as the Axe and Cross. But the most glaring flaw of all is even more basic than any of that: There’s not nearly enough witch hunting. The Last Witch Hunter has a lot of flaws: its plodding pace, its lazy direction, its muddled story, its hopelessly expository dialogue.