To keep himself busy between “Fast & Furious” sequels, star Vin Diesel has been on the prowl for a franchise to call his own lately. Turning “Pitch Black” into series didn’t quite work out as planned,Download The Last Witch Hunter Movie, overestimating the appeal of the glum lead character, Riddick. Now there’s “The Last Witch Hunter,” which is Diesel’s version of a Marvel Comics movie, merging exaggerated superhero antics with a darker tone of supernatural awakening. There are witches galore here, but very little excitement,Watch The Last Witch Hunter Online DVDrip Quality, as director Breck Eisner is too infatuated with his elaborate CGI designs to realize that the screenplay (credited to three writers) is nothing more than one long spewing of exposition. Sure, Diesel’s character wields a flaming sword, but it’s a visual better suited for a feature that knows how to appropriately exploit such delicious absurdity.
800 years ago, Kaulder (Vin Diesel) was a warrior and family man joining his clan on a mission to destroy the Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht), who’s responsible for the spread of the black plague. Striking at the heart of his enemy, Kaulder’s victory is tempered by a curse of immortality. Working through the years as a witch hunter for the secret society,Download The Last Witch Hunter On DVD, The Ax and Cross, Kaulder is managed by Dolan 36th (Michael Caine), who’s about to retire, helping to train Dolan 37th (Elijah Wood) on the ways of witch detection and hero support. When suspicious events begin to pop up around the city, Kaulder embarks on an investigation, meeting witch Chloe (Rose Leslie), who has the power to visit dreamscapes. Forming a tentative bond with his sworn enemy, Kaulder encounters a greater threat when powerful witch minions begin to clear a path for the Witch Queen’s return to the land of the living, altering everything former barbarian understands about his centuries-old quest.
While “The Last Witch Hunter” opens with a battle between Kaulder and the Witch Queen, following the bearded brute into an abyssal “Plague Tree” to conquer an enemy armed with elemental powers, it doesn’t remain in this state of emergency. The screenplay is primarily concerned with providing an education on all things Witch Huntery,Download The Last Witch Hunter movie in DVD, spending a substantial time introducing elements of Kaulder’s daily business, his interplay with the two Dolans, and his “Highlander”-esque life of immortality, which is largely spent abusing his powers to sleep with flight attendants. With a title this bold, one might expect “The Last Witch Hunter” to be wall-to-all action featuring Diesel in a series of gladiator poses. And yet, Eisner (“Sahara,” “The Crazies”) doesn’t make the obvious choice to celebrate this wild world of black magic, instead laboring to explain every inch of it in a manner that treats the audience like idiots, with dialogue frequently narrating obvious action, making sure viewers just barely paying attention to the story are aware of everything within the frame.
This hand-holding approach is unnecessary, borderline obnoxious when one considers just how silly “The Last Witch Hunter” is. It’s a visual effects extravaganza, but the production doesn’t trust cinematic storytelling, with dialogue clunky and performances painfully obvious (Leslie could power a large suburb with her overacting),Download The Last Witch Hunter movie all quality, while the tale itself is generally ignorant or unwilling to explore its own characters. Kaulder is a missed opportunity, with his immortality barely defined beyond keepsakes in his Central Park apartment and his honed way with routine. The titular Witch Hunter would be far more interesting as a pained soul with nearly a millennium of life experience. Instead, here’s another too-cool-for-school Diesel performance with two speeds: drowsy arrogance and mildly haunted (flashbacks and hallucinations share images of a wife and daughter lost to period horrors). It’s dull to watch, especially when “The Last Witch Hunter” slips into detective mode, following the heroes into easily preventable trouble with pushover adversaries, which once again highlights the lack of physical activity presented here.
“The Last Witch Hunter” is hip-deep in CGI, which covers everything from basic facial transformations to monstrous sentinels. Practical effects are verboten, allowing digital fatigue to set in alarmingly fast,Download The Last Witch Hunter movie DVD CAM, finding Kaulder’s ghoulish encounters repetitive and numbing, especially without spunky performances to break up the monotony of endless exposition and thick-tongued Diesel line-readings. The picture ends up becoming a foundation for future adventures with the characters, feeling more like a career investment for Diesel than outrageous spectacle with a new conqueror of evil, earning multiple continuations. It’s titled “The Last Witch Hunter” for goodness’ sake. Fantasy fearlessness shouldn’t be this boring.
The Last Witch Hunter has wild ideas hidden in generic trappings. It features a gleefully nonsensical plot, a mysterious original(ish) concoction of mythology, and plenty of striking fantasy horror imagery. It starts in a murky distant past where men wielding flaming swords clash with shape-shifting witches in the cavernous roots of a massive dark tree that we learn is the source of the Black Plague. Then, we skip forward 800 years into the future – our time – to find the one remaining Witch Hunter.Download The Last Witch Hunter movie hq, The dying Witch Queen cursed him with immortality, and so he has spent his centuries resigned to hunting down the evil witches and warlocks making the world a worse place. He does so under the careful watch of a supernatural council hidden in the bowels of a New York cathedral, the better for his Catholic priest assistants to help him. All that’s wonderfully ridiculous, and refreshingly nutty, but it moves in heaving clunks of bland thriller mechanics and endless expository dialogue.
The Witch Hunter is Kaulder (Vin Diesel), a towering bald tough guy who swaggers around showing magic users what’s what. There’s a scene in which he enters an underground bar for magic people and they preemptively flee. The owner (Rose Leslie) lets him know that her kind view him as a genocidal fascist, which, considering the whole single-mindedly hunting their kind for centuries, seems like a fair enough label. Still, we’re to understand Kaulder is a kindhearted guy out to indefinitely imprison only bad witches.Download and Watch The Last Witch Hunter Movie, That’s nice. He’s soulfully mourning his mortality by staring off into space, hiding his psychic wounds behind a jaded exterior. His priest chaperone (Michael Caine) chastises him for always running late. “Time works differently for me,” he rumbles. Diesel has commitment, and investment in the loopy ins and outs that helps bring some reverence to the ridiculous.
Caine’s priest tells us plenty about the history of the Ax and Cross, a secret order of Catholic officials who have passed the Witch Hunting legacy down one at a time for centuries. A new, younger one (Elijah Wood) is waiting in the wings. The movie starts to shape up like a buddy cop movie in a conspiratorial cultish underground monster movie mode,Download The Last Witch Hunter movie in DVD, investigating, say, a blind warlock (Isaach De Bankolé) whose butterfly-infested bakery uses mind-altering grubs in the dough. Soon, though, they learn the long-dead Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht) has minions (like Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) plotting to revive her and take over the world with her Plague once more. This leads to one of the movie’s best moments, where the camera pushes in on a character who has put two and two together and murmurs the one place that has enough dark power to restore this dormant evil to full life: Witch Jail.
It’s a race through dream spaces and nightmarish hallucinations to find the MacGuffins necessary to restore order to the world and stave off a malevolent resurrection. The main problem is Kaulder’s memory, though it is totally understandable that he can’t remember a crucial detail from 800 years prior and thus must hunt down a spell that’ll restore him.Download The Last Witch Hunter Movie, He teams up with the bar-owning witch and his priests to walk around explaining the rules of the magic, the monsters they encounter, ancient curse antidotes they need, right when each new factor appears. Sure, there are swordfights and spells cast and glowing doodads flipped around. But mostly those involved make sure to thoroughly explain what they’re about to do, and then, once done, explain what they just did. And even then I still didn’t really understand every detail.
It’d be more fun if the screenplay by Cory Goodman (Priest) and Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (Dracula Untold) would let its characters shut up for a second, take a deep breath, and be more than exposition spigots, because director Breck Eisner (Sahara) does a credible job selling the outlandish ideas visually. When a sorceress uses a necklace to awaken a tree monster, it’s not hard to figure out the causal relationship. And when a sword impaling one character causes pain in another, the connection is clear.Watch The Last Witch Hunter Online, We don’t necessarily need people tiresomely expounding. Just move along. Show us cool things. I liked the Witch Queen’s look: like a life-size woodcarving brought to life, with a mop of greasy spaghetti hair and a thick brain stem braid. It’s icky and creepy. And when she’s dead (the first time) she looks like burnt firewood. It’s all the better for remaining mysterious, unexplained. This is a movie about deep, dark magic threatening to burst forth from underneath the surface of modernity, and instead of urgency or menace, it’s just neat to look at.
