I’ve become so inured to Hollywood’s formula about movies releasing — “good” blockbusters reserved for summer and post-Thanksgiving; crap scheduled for Labor Day weekend and early January; expensive duds set for early spring — that it sometimes feels you can guess the quality of a film by its release date. So far, 2013 has had a few exceptions: Mama was more thought-provoking than nightmare-inducing horror, and Side Effects, while not a hit, was smarter and livelier than director Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 winter release, Haywire. Add to that list Jack the Giant Slayer.
Studios have overwhelmed audiences in recent years with a new subgenre: The revisionist fair tale. From Red Riding Hood to Snow White and the Huntman (and its lesser sister, Mirror, Mirror) to Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, reimagined myths have begun to wear out their welcome. (Execs smartly cast name-brand actors, like Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron, to give them the gloss of respectability if not artistic cred.) That makes the one-two punch of Jack and next week’s Oz, The Great and Powerful seem likes rushes to the middle, clearing the cupboards until the “real” hits role out in May.
Not so, however, with Jack the Giant Slayer.
The director, Bryan Singer, hired Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning writer of his best film, The Usual Suspects, to script-doctor this retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk with an eye toward twin goals: Fleshing out the sketchiest of characters (how dumb is a kid who trades his horse for “magic” beans?) and supplying believable twists so that a bedtime story takes on a mythic quality. The result is a film that provides more surprises than you expect, and people who seem almost human … even the giants.
Jack (Nicholas Hoult, pictured right) isn’t as stupid as the story suggests. He doesn’t trade his horse so much as get swindled by a monk, whom he justly trusts. And when Jack volunteers along with the King’s (Ian McShane) men (led by Ewan McGregor) to climb the stalk and prevent an invasion of giants, he’s not treated with contempt like most screenplays would, but as a brave peasant who deserves props for putting his life on the line for his majesty. In other words: Jack has more in common with The Lord of the Rings trilogy of questing everyday knights than it does your average buddy-cop picture. Sure, the bad guys are moustache-twirlingly evil, but not everyone gets branded with the same broad brush. Characters who seem like they might prove useful down the road (played by respected actors like Ewen Bremner and Eddie Marsan) get unexpectedly killed off; indeed, the bad-guy target keeps moving, from human to one giant to another.
It helps that this CGI-heavy extravaganza uses a form of motion-capture that allows actual actors to embody the digitized villains: Bill Nighy and John Kassir are two heads sharing the same body of the lead giant, a decision that adds immeasurably to what passes for authenticity in a fantasy film. The plot zigs and zags enough that unlike, say, The Twilight Saga, you rarely pause to ask yourself why the characters are behaving in so boneheaded a way.
The flesh-and-bone actors are good, too, with McGregor especially adept at striding between arrogant captain-of-the-guard (as his Obi-Wan usually comes off) and practical hero. McShane’s king is strong but not stubborn, while Hoult and Stanley Tucci make for contrasting protagonists and antagonists.
Will Jack make you forget Gladiator? Maybe not. But it’s the least formulaic of action films in a long time, and one of the most unexpected. From modest beans, delicious fruit can grow.
Opens in wide release tomorrow.
