Movie: Artemis Fowl
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Screenplay by: Conor McPherson and Hamish McColl
Where to watch: Disney +
This review contains no significant spoilers for the film in question.
Disney fouls the waters of urban fantasy with a movie that fails as both adaptation and film. This film is exactly the wrong way to spend $125 million—or two hours of your time.
It’s been well over a decade since I read Artemis Fowl. I’ve lost the finer points of what the story was about and I’d be lying if I said it had any great impact on me as a reader, but I remember it being fun and I remember enjoying it and at least one—maybe two—of its sequels. Eoin Colfer built a fun middlegrade world and populated it with one of the only instances in my memory of an anti-hero in middlegrade fiction.
At its core, it’s essentially an urban fantasy for kids. It melds science fiction elements with the fantastic. It had all the makings of a successful movie franchise—great potential visuals, an extant fanbase (reports state that over 25 Million of Colfer’s novels have been sold), and a premise interesting enough for parents and kids alike to have something to watch together. As an anti-hero, Artemis is a bit grittier than the average children’s fare that might limit the audience of other franchises.
Disney took a home run and foul-balled it. Hard. The film is bad. Really, it’s barely a movie. The script is terrible, character motivations are vague and change at the drop of a hat, the action scenes are confusing and dizzying, and the plot is sort of stapled together by near-constant narration in hopes that the audience might be able to make out what’s going on from moment to moment (spoilers: it’s really tough to follow).
The Script
Where do I begin? This children’s movie isn’t funny. They had Josh Gad and they still couldn’t make the jokes land. A couple of his lines made me smirk, but there’s no heart in this movie’s humor—it’s bland and uninteresting.
Exposition is everywhere and every tired exposition trope I can imagine is used: newscasts, “as you know” dialogue, one character awkwardly reminding another character about information they definitely already know, a therapy session—there’s even an interrogation filmed entirely—and strangely—in black and white that takes place over the course of the entire movie. This last serves as the reason for the movie to have a narrator who explains why characters are doing the things they do in various scenes, as opposed to, you know, the script doing that through motivated action. (As a side note: can we call that interroration? Interronarration? Narragation? Trite, pointless, amateurish, and lazy? I like that one.)
Every line of dialogue serves to remind that no one speaks like that. Lines are bizarre or so filled with exposition that nothing else could possibly survive in their habitat.
There are so many pointless occurrences in the first twenty minutes that I stopped trying to understand why they’re laced in there: Artemis likes to surf, I guess? It’s never revisited or made use of and Ireland doesn’t strike me as a place known for its surfing. He goes to school with kids his own age? Why? They give us a laundry list of accomplishments that indicate he’d have left learning behind long ago.
It’s a messy, messy script. I can’t imagine how this got pushed through.
The Characters
It’s rare that I’ll say this so freely: the problems with this movie’s characters aren’t in its child actors. Ferdia Shaw and Lara McDonnell might have done well enough with what was given to them—it’s impossible to say. The movie gives no room for any real acting, be it good or bad. The problem, then, is what’s given to them. It’s bad. It’s really bad.
Artemis is billed as a criminal mastermind. From what I can tell, he breaks no real laws and has no real plans. A lot of happy coincidences follow this boy genius. I’ve been told that he’s almost amoral and compelling in the novels, but that is far from his portrayal here. We are told much about him that never comes off in the showing. He makes a few “deductions” in the film that strain credulity beyond the breaking point—he learns things not because he’s smart, but because he’s the protagonist and the script says it’s time. He’s made out to be some kind of a hero and a protector, but he’s a painfully passive protagonist and much of the movie is him waiting for other characters to do things “just as he planned” so he can win the day.
Artemis’ bodyguard Butler never feels fleshed out. He exists to do the punchy punch stabby stabby work. I feel nothing for this character. He is a great big void of concern and emotion.
The fairies, pixies, dwarves, whatever all feel like cardboard cutouts who are placed ever-just-so to make the plot happen. Nothing about them is memorable or interesting—except Josh Gad’s character’s penchant for eating and pooping dirt, I guess. Oh, Gad’s bizarre accent sounds both painful to produce and oddly sensual at times. I’m not sure why this dwarf is making bedroom voices at me, but I didn’t like it. Would not recommend.
I’m completely convinced that Dame Judi Dench has designs to violently end her career. Between this movie and Cats, I just don’t believe she wants to keep on acting. Dench is a veteran actor and an incredible talent. As facetious as I’m being, I hope to see her soon in many, many more movies of much higher quality than this slosh.
The villain? Opal, I think her name is? Totally forgettable and barely a plot device. She tells Artemis to get her a Macguffin she wants really badly and when he asks what it is she tells him to figure it out himself and that he has a three-day time limit. Why the limit? Why doesn’t she provide useful information to the boy who is supposed to be getting her her heart’s desire? Why is she incapable of getting it herself? The world will never know because the writers didn’t think about it enough to answer any of those questions.
The Action
Frequently, these kinds of movies are dull but have great action. The action in this film is frenetic, hard to follow, and nothing really special. It, like most of the movie, is totally forgettable.
The Plot
Don’t bother trying to follow the throughline of the plot—it’s barely there. This movie clearly underwent some massive edits after shooting. At some point, I’m convinced that the writers or director realized they didn’t actually have a story, so they added some narration to try and alchemize one from all the disparate pieces. It didn’t work.
Final Thoughts
I don’t who to blame for this movie. Disney? Kenneth Branagh? I have to say, I love Branagh’s work as an actor, but his directing has been very hit and miss for me. Still, I think I lay the blame at Disney’s feet. They watered down an interesting character and made an almost unwatchable movie. They misspent $125 million and at some point during production, I think they realized that. They pushed it to Disney+ instead of waiting for theaters to be open to new films again—a move, I note, they didn’t take with properties like Black Widow or Mulan.
This may well be one of Disney’s worst live-action films, but it doesn’t achieve bad-movie cult status. It doesn’t take any risks. It’s completely blah and totally unmemorable. In so many ways, this is the worst thing a movie like this could be. A movie whose premise and tone should all be about spectacle (re: science fiction and fantasy films, generally) can’t afford to be forgettable.
Why do I care? This wasn’t a beloved childhood property for me. It’s not something I was actively looking forward to. But its failure hits close to home for me because I adore urban fantasy.
I want more movies like Onward and more TV like Supernatural. Movies like Artemis Fowl and Bright work against that goal. If studios don’t see these movies as possible successes, we get fewer of them and that’s a real shame. Disney, try harder.
My Rating: ★