![]() ![]() They’re not helped by the fact that much of Witch Hunter is a fantastic police procedural, which requires its own steady diet of expositional information to keep moving forward, as Kaulder pulls out all the stops to find the person who appears to have murdered his old friend.ĭiesel himself is immune to a lot of the problems as he gets to sprinkle his statements on how magic works with the odd insightful musing on the very human nature of evil. The lack of cohesion in action, character and story is Witch Hunter’s most consistent feature such that most characters’ dialogue is entirely expositional explaining some new wrinkle in the rules of the world without any sort of emotional connection to it. ![]() It encourages efficiency of storytelling, attaching important character elements to import world-building concepts so that both can be introduced together, which is a good idea when it works and a bad one when it doesn’t.Īnd it doesn’t work here as is clear from the first voice over from Kaulder’s long-time helper Dolan (Caine) explaining the rules of the secret world of magic the two of them police which the film doesn’t have time to show because of an extended action open. Theoretically, there’s no reason why these imperatives should be competing at all, but the reality is a feature film has a limited time frame in which to deliver all the necessary information for understanding it. Because it’s also urban fantasy story with magic and monsters and mythology, it has to spend considerable time building the world Kaulder and his friends live in and the rules they abide by. There’s a lot of ground to be covered by mining the inner life of someone who innately views the human experience from an alien perspective (and The Last Witch Hunter is at its best when it does so), but the film has its hands too full for that. Characters like the enigmatic Kaulder ( Vin Diesel), an 800-year old man who deals with the existential burden of immortality by focusing on work – in his case hunting down and killing witches. On the one hand they must perform the most elementary function of all successful fiction - creating engaging characters an audience will identify with. Introducing new and enticing fantasy requires juggling two competing imperatives, both necessary and neither particularly useful to the other.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |