Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
Cast: Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood, Michael Caine, Julie Engelbrecht, Rena Owen, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Isaach De Bankolé, Michael Halsey, Bex Taylor Klaus, Lotte Verbeek.
It is the enemies that you don’t see coming that leads the soul to mortal terror. Those that hate you and openly declare war on you and your kind, at least with those you can reason with, draw a line in the idle and share Time on Earth without ever seeing again, it is those that profess to have your best interests at heart that you have to wary of.
Magic in cinema, in any type of film can be hit or miss. So many supposed noble films have bitten the dust because they try to dilute the fragmentation between good and evil, rather than try to show the thin line that is divisible and the boundaries that can be crossed when an accord is reached. In The Last Witch Hunter that line is shown and revealed to be one that works, even in its broadest possible sense and allows the subtly of excellent fantasy to cross into the realm of half decent drama.
This exchange is felt down to the casting of Rose Leslie as young sleep walker witch Chloe and Julie Engelbrecht as the Witch Queen, two superbly well met women being given pride of place in a film that requires Vin Diesel to be as likeable as possible without spilling over into some misogynistic avenger, struck by an ideal and unwilling to yield to any other thought process. It is in this difference to the fantasy that allows The Last Witch Hunter to breathe with more passion than it might have otherwise allowed to fester within.
Fantasy is such a hard concept to get round, especially when the parameters keep changing, when the object of the game changes over time. For once stood Vampires, now stands the Witch, both equally haunted in dreams across the centuries, both equally steeped in folklore, however it does feel as though in parts as if this is more of a declaration of war against the so called weird and the odd than a true reflection of how society would act, fantasy it may be, but it still has some vestige of honour to keep together.
The Last Witch Hunter works because it is allowed to, it doesn’t stray too deep into the mythology of witch craft, certainly not enough to get bogged down in the turmoil beset so many films in its genre and it doesn’t allow the audience time to pull away from the story-line. Strangely for a film of its genre, it flows really well and is worthy of being seen for what it is, more of an adventure than erring into the realms of the forgotten and the unrelentingly dull and misinformed.
An enchantment rather than a curse, The Last Witch Hunter will more than likely come around for another spell.
Ian D. Hall