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DWatching Vin Diesel struggle through The Last Witch Hunter gave me a renewed appreciation for the talents of Nicolas Cage, who has headed up the cast in many a similar movie in recent years. With Diesel in the title role, The Last Witch Hunter is a plodding, somber mess. With Cage, the movie would still have been a mess, but it could have been a goofy guilty pleasure.

As the title implies, Diesel is Kaulder, an immortal who, for the last 800 years has hunted down misbehaving witches and imprisoning them. His only helpers are a line of priests called dolans, most recently Michael Caine (who’s dispatched about 30 minutes into the movie) and now Elijah Wood. Now, however, the Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht) that Kaulder killed originally wants to return and unleash a plague on the world. 

The Last Witch Hunter is a bad movie on many levels. The plot makes little sense, even by the standards of these types of films, and the characters spend far too much time explaining the mythology of the film. The movie needs a light touch, but efforts at humor are few and far between. Most of the actors appear extremely uncomfortable in their roles, except for Michael Caine, who is dispatched about 30 minutes into the movie and good witch Chloe (Rose Leslie), the only mildly interesting character in the film. The Witch Queen is an extremely underwhelming villain; she looks like she spent the last 800 years in a mud bath. Still, she looks better than the medieval version of Diesel, who looks like he wandered off the set of the Vikings TV series. The film carries a PG-13 rating, which limits the amount of gore and skin that can be shown. As a result. director Breck Eisner fills the screen with overloaded, confusing, bad CGI images, making the final showdown nearly impossible to decipher. Worst of all, The Last Witch Hunter ends with Kaulder and Chloe riding off into the sunset in his spiffed up Aston Martin looking for more witches to hunt. Unless that hunt involves some of his Fast and Furious castmates, you’d better hope that any sequel is another 800 years in coming.  
Continue reading on The Last Witch Hunter: Mini-review »

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