The more movies you see the harder it becomes to look past the bad. While all movies are supposed to entertain in some way, not all of them succeed , sometimes not on any level. Then their are times when you get lucky and even the bad movie can become the entertainment, as in laughing at you and not with you sort of way. The early months of the year are filled with these movies, which make you feel like January and February are the months of the misfit movies, where every movie without a home is welcome and us of moviegoers are given choices of bad to worst to fill our movie desires.
“Seventh Son” is one of these movies that I speak of; the only question is what category does it fit in? Master Gregory (Jeff Bridges) is a spook, or someone who gets rid of creatures that are not welcomed on this earth. With his apprentice Bill Bradley (Kit Harington), who knows nothing, soon finds himself captured by a witch, who rids Master Gregory of his apprentice. In need of a new one Gregory seeks out the seventh son of a family and claims Tom Ward (Ben Barnes) as his new apprentice. Gregory has little time to train, as Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore) has retuned, and with the blood moon coming, she gathers her followers and prepares to rule the world. There is only one thing in her way and that is the spook Gregory and his new apprentice Tom, who has a secret of his own that just might save the world.
I know what you are thinking, that there really isn’t a whole lot to this film’s description, well that is because there isn’t a whole lot to this movie. I always heard that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all, well I am a critic, so I can’t do that, so I will try my best. The first thing you will notice is this film had two of the better actors of the last twenty years in Moore and Bridges. While Moore is new to a movie like this, Bridges it seems has taken the Johnny Depp path of playing the same role in every movie, no matter the genre. Once you get past the two “A” list actors, you get a team of writers who have adapted Joseph Delaney’s novel “The Spook’s Apprentice”, who you assume did a bad job at that, since the story goes all over the place and seems uninspired. With all that is working against him, Director Sergey Bodrov tries to take your attention off the train wreck of a story with dragons, explosions and a little help from John Snow, who might not be in the film even long enough to call it an appearance. It is movies like “Seventh Son” that makes you not want to venture into a movie theater for the fears you might see. So heed my warning and do not take this journey, for this is one adventure you would be wise to skip.
Brian Taylor