“Seventh Son” harks back to ancient times: the early 1960s, when kiddie matinees featured pirate skeletons sword-fighting sea serpents, and all was right with the world.
It’s a medieval fantasy in which the local knight and demon hunter, known as the Spook (Jeff Bridges, doing a crazy-coot mumble), enlists the aid of a sturdy seventh son (Ben Barnes) to aid him to battle local sorceress Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore in let-‘er-rip mode).
Some scripts seem like they were written with a bottle of whiskey and a loaded .45 close at hand. “Seventh Son” seems to have been dreamed up in close proximity to juice boxes and fluffernutters. Nothing needs to make sense; it just needs to sound wicked to your average 10-year-old. Hence: “Let’s have the lady dress up in a black thing with feathers, like a witch or a demon!”
“Yeah! Or Cher!”
“She turns into a dragon!”
“Skeleton dragon!”
“. . . made of metal!”
“Of course! And she eats bloodcakes!”
“. . . with live worms!”
The boyish senselessness is the point: The movie doesn’t get bogged down in explaining how it all works or what exactly it will take to bring the witch down. All you need to know is that if it looks cool to have someone explode into a fireball when poked with a wooden spear, that’s what we’ll get. If things threaten to get a little dull when our young hero falls for the witchy niece (Alicia Vikander), there’ll be a tree-monster or a man-bear along shortly. Toward the end, someone randomly turns into a jaguar, and who can argue with that?
In addition to featuring Oscar-brand actors (Djimon Hounsou is also on hand, as an assassin-dragon), the visuals are more than serviceable. Oscar winners toiled behind the scenes too — there are Dante Ferretti sets and John Dykstra special effects, each of them slumming it in style.
Perhaps no achievement is more impressive than that of Bridges, who manages to keep a straight face throughout, even in the inevitable training montage. After giving his young protégé a sip from an enchanted-looking flask, he warns gravely, “You must never take more than one sip of this a day.” Why? “Because it’s mine,” he snaps.
“Seventh Son” is not a good movie, but it’s also not a pretentious one, and I call that a fair trade. I was disappointed that there were no fire-breathing mummy ninjas from space, but you have to save something for the sequel.