What a disaster.

First and foremost, why do so many characters have raspy voices? Did the director ask Judi Dench and Josh Gad to talk like they haven’t had a drop of water in a week?  Josh Gad’s character even says “look at us, grunting at eachother like a pair of hippos with a throat infection.”  They were all aware that this sounds like garbage, and continued to do it anyways.  Is there some sort of bubble out there in Hollywood where people don’t hear criticisms of movies, and then decide to produce them anyways?  Christopher Nolan’s Batman films were such great movies, and people still make fun of how Batman talked in his fake raspy voice.  No one wants to hear that especially not for 90 minutes straight.

Why is this story told from the point of view of a prisoner’s interview?  Everything was explained so poorly.  There were so many half-baked ideas used to produce full on action scenes that it just raised questions.  So many questions.

I won’t spend long on this next point, but Ferdia Shaw is too young.  He was too young, but i’m not throwing the full weight of this movie’s failures on his shoulders.  Maybe he represents the correct age for Artemis Fowl in the book, but he is apparently too inexperienced to deliver a believable criminal mastermind.  I know he’s a kid and maybe this was the best possible delivery from someone his age, but it was super off putting and distracting.

They also didn’t really explain that Artemis Fowl was a child criminal mastermind, they just went for generic genius looking for his dad?  At the end of the movie, the very end, he says “I’m a criminal mastermind.”  So now, we as an audience know he’s not just smart, he’s actually what the entire book series told us he was, and the film did not.  A criminal mastermind.  What a joke.  A little bit of character development may have helped to smooth out the edges here with the child actor’s performance, but they didn’t try to do that at all.  Well, they tried, but it was simply Artemis being shown next to a bunch of advanced textbooks and then him being rude to a psychologist because he’s too smart to be understood by anyone.  So they tried and failed.

Weird choices plague this entire movie, I can’t even explain them all because I can’t remember the movie scene for scene but trust me when I say that it’s terrible in its entirety.  So many short disjointed scenes, so many odd lines of dialogue.  I never knew exactly what they were trying to convey unless it was an attempt at humor nor can I actually can’t think of a reason for half of the scenes.  The camera focuses awkwardly on characters during dialogue, the horrible unimaginative dialogue.  “Top of the mornin” says Judy Dench in the middle of a fairy police raid.

Please make it stop.

The camera makes hard cuts, jumping from character to character, even when there is no dialogue and my guess is that the purpose is to convey some sort of emotion?  Suspense?  They might have been going for shock and awe, but I’m still not sure they did anything successful besides create confusion.  The camera would focus on someone’s face for no other purpose than to show an exaggerated expression.

I hate everyone in this movie.  The fairy police officer Holly Short, who for some reason is trusted to do solo missions and constantly disobeys orders for no reason.  It didn’t make her feel rebellious or whatever the attempted angle was, it made her seem stupid.  Was the Centaur Foaly supposed to be comedic relief or….?  I don’t even want to discuss the dwarf.  I really only knew the motivation of Artemis, and it boils down to “Where’s my dad?”  The “giant” dwarf. Was there not enough in the budget to do CGI on Mulch Diggums to make him small?  Better to just leave him the same size as the actor despite dwarves being small.  I’m not sure if Mulch Diggums was supposedly larger than the average dwarf in the book, but it felt super lazy in the movie.

I wanted to say that the humor fell flat, but it really didn’t fall flat, it failed in a spectacular way that “fell flat” doesn’t do justice.  Why are there gluten jokes, and what was the point of the David Bowie reference?  Did the director have some idea playing in his mind that drool-faced softbrains would be sitting in the theater clapping to each other at the mere mention of the name David Bowie?  “Oh I know that name, LOL, he said David Bowie was a fairy!”

Thank God this movie didn’t make it to the theater.  No respect for the source material and no respect for the audience.

What the hell was this movie other than an insulting mess.  If you think that maybe i’m being too harsh on a children’s Disney movie, watch it yourself.  Then, join the club in tearing it apart in the hopes that they don’t make a sequel to this trash.  Kenneth Branagh should be ashamed of himself for directing this.

1/10