The Last Witch Hunter plagued by bad script, worse CGI: review

The Last Witch Hunter

1.5 stars

Starring Vin Diesel, Michael Caine, Elijah Wood, Rose Leslie and Julie Engelbrecht. Directed by Breck Eisner. 106 minutes. Opens Friday at major theatres. 14A

You can take the man out of the car, but you can’t take the gas out of Vin Diesel.

The essential Diesel seeps through, even when he’s playing an 800-year-old immortal she-devil slayer in the regrettable occult thriller The Last Witch Hunter,where hetwirls a fiery sword rather than a steering wheel.

This is no mean feat, considering The Last WitchHunter is so drenched in CGI effects, it looks as if it’s been dunked in a vat of lacquer.

The visual murk, along with Breck Eisner’s dismal direction and an impenetrable script, overwhelm two serious thespians in the cast, Michael Caine and Elijah Wood. They’re reduced to cardboard versions of the same dull character, a Roman Catholic clerical advisor named Dolan, who somehow assists Diesel’s witch-hunting Kaulder.

Things get off to a rollicking start, opening in medieval times as Kaulder leads a band of European stalwarts determined to roast the Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht). She has unleashed the Black Death upon the world, a fact historians and epidemiologists seem to have overlooked.

With his Fort Apache rug and shaggy beard, Diesel is a double for one of Tom Hardy’s gnarlier characters as he dispatches the evil crone — but not before she vengefully confers the curse of immortality upon him.

Jump to 21st-century New York, and Diesel is back to the bullet-headed bouncer look of popular renown, still as incommunicative as always and fatally lacking in humour. The immortality curse and hag-hunting mandate remain, as does the witch’s determination to fatally infect the planet.

Kaulder joins forces with a witchy turncoat, the feisty Chloe (Game of Thrones’ Rose Leslie), and the quest is on. Kaulder admits to Chloe that he gets tired of smiting witches and their stooges (“It’s boring”) and on this we can heartily agree with the big lug.

Pity, though, that nothing is made of his reference to “witch prison,” some kind of corral for cacklers awaiting his sword. I picture Vin Diesel leading a posse of foxy women in a rousing version of “Jailhouse Rock,” and that I would gladly pay money to see.