‘Artemis Fowl’ is 200 improvements away from being a debacle
Disney
The world finally has an onscreen hero representing the love child of Chuck Norris and Mark Zuckerberg, as minutes into “Artemis Fowl” the title character (Ferdia Shaw) is said to have beaten a European chess champion in just five moves at the age of 7 and now, at 12, doesn’t respect anyone enough to treat them as an equal. Few attempts to make a movie kid seem cool have been more desperate and pathetic than this one, which clearly believes that just because a person wears sunglasses a lot and is alluded to as a Jesus-like figure means major emotional investment will follow. I really expected someone to shout “This kid is special special special special!” and for that someone to be Mulch Diggums (Josh Gad), whose name seems to have resulted from asking a 1-year-old to say “Ralph Wiggum” and whose casting resulted from the casting director apparently having never seen Josh Gad in anything. Though considering Mulch Diggums is a growling, human-sized dwarf who shoots dirt from his butt, perhaps this was not the role every major Hollywood actor was lining up to play.
Anyway, this movie. Reminiscent of everything and better than nothing, “Artemis Fowl” is like a writer was asked to create “Jupiter Ascending” for kids but make the main character Batman’s nephew or Harry Potter’s cousin or something and watch five minutes of “Lord of the Rings” and “Mission: Impossible III” while you’re typing and please have the script on my desk in like an hour, K? In the simplest possible terms, this massive failure of a franchise launcher, adapted from two books by Eoin Colfer and directed by master of special effects and fun Kenneth Branagh (“Hamlet,” “Cinderella,” “Thor”), chronicles Artemis’ attempt to acquire something called the Aculos and save his kidnapped father (Colin Farrell, who must really have been kidnapped) from a raspy-voiced being that never takes its hood off. Yes, that’s the simple version. For a sense of the storytelling here, it’s worth noting that when Artemis gets his assignment and asks what the Aculos is, he is simply told, “A weapon so powerful and mysterious it can barely be imagined.” Because a villain who really wants something should definitely force the seeker to spend an extended period of time sitting down doing research about what the hell he’s looking for. That line is one of the all-time dumbest non-explanations of a McGuffin, and if you make it more than 8 minutes into “Artemis Fowl” there is a 3,000,000,000% chance it’s because you are on your phone, texting someone that you have lost all faith in magic, the exact opposite of what this disaster wants for you.
Not a single characterization clicks, from the human-sized fairy named Holly Short who is 84 but played by a child (Lara McDonnell) or Artemis’ protector Domovoi Butler (Nonso Anozie), who, as Mulch notes, hates being called Butler because this movie is a laugh riot and won’t at all make you write angry letters vaguely addressed to Hollywood about if maybe sometimes this money should just be sent to charity because really the world will be fine without trash like this -- which has been in development seemingly all century and is still nowhere close to finished.
Though this impenetrable, deeply annoying movie consists entirely of characters doing either almost nothing or way too much, perhaps out of context some of “Artemis Fowl” might seem oddly fun: Judi Dench playing a commander, wearing big, neon green sunglasses and saying “Top of the mornin’”? A few instances of a “time freeze,” which is really just a Zack Morris timeout with a visual style that’s like off-brand “Inception”? A centaur responsible for encoding language and a subplot about robbing precious, valuable items from around the world that … really isn’t explained or resolved at all? Who wouldn’t love all this?
Spend “Artemis Fowl” aghast that Disney thought these giant troll sequences wouldn’t just recall the awful, live-action “Jack and the Beanstalk” that you’d previously wiped from your memory, and that somehow recognition of the existence of a fairy-, dwarf- and goblin-based underground world can be so painfully dull. Find a way to connect with Branagh and ask him to explain the mythology, and the underlying narrative about tolerance and revenge, in a way that could be understood by the target demo. Try not to wake up in a panicked sweat as you remember Mulch having the gall to compare Dench’s character to David Bowie just before uttering the line, “Look at the two of us grunting at each other like a pair of hippos with a throat infection.”
Then take a few minutes to reflect on maybe the most shocking moment, which comes early on when Mulch, whose voiceover continues throughout the movie in case any viewer hasn’t bashed their head into the wall at least once, explains that this tale takes place in the most magical place on Earth: Ireland. It’s as if Disney, with this movie, is finally admitting, “We can no longer claim to deliver the most magic. It’s over.”
D-
Order “Zack Morris Lied 329 Times! Reassessing every ridiculous episode of ‘Saved by the Bell’ … with stats” (featuring interviews with 22 cast members, plus the co-founder of Saved by the Max and the creator of “Zack Morris is Trash”)