Jack The Giant Slayer

The 90´s had a lot of great movie releases, with great casting and production value. And then we have those releases you never expected to be anything, but turned out to be very good. Just like The Usual Suspects. A thriller with so many twists, and very hard to predict how it would end. Director Bryan Singer proved that even if you make an ordinary story about criminals, you can still make it original, as long as you have a good idea. As the years walked on by, Bryan Singer signed up to direct both X-Men and X-Men 2, including Superman Returns. By all means a very talented director, with a vision of how to make comics come to life. After making the nazi movie Valkyrie with Tom Cruise, Bryan decided to do something more old fashioned. He decided to make a fresh update of Jack And The Bean Stalk, as well as Jack The Giant Killer. Kids and teens all over the world have read these stories, or seen the cartoons, know what the stories are all about. So with a classic fairytale in our hands, is Jack The Giant Slayer a family adventure everyone can enjoy, or is this fairytale just as thin as The Jonas Brothers ?

When Jack ( Nicholas Hault ) grew up in his fathers farm house, he loved to hear the fairytale about the legend of Erik, an ancient king who defeated an army of giants, with the help of a magic crown, made from a giants heart. This crown could let you control giants to do whatever you wish, as long as you wear it. 10 years later, Jack is still at the farm heping his father. While trying to sell a horse into town, watching a theatre play, he tries to help a girl who is attacked by a group of thugs. It turns out she is the princess Isabelle, who is very thankful for his help. While trying to sell his horse, a monk offers him a good amount of Money for the horse, if he agrees to get money from the monastery. As a gift, for the horse, the monk leaves him a small bag of beans. The monk says they are special beans. Jack agree and gives the monk the horse, and take the beans with him. His father is furious, and say the monk tricked him. One rainy night, while considering to go outside, Jack is visited by princess Isabelle, she run away from the castle, since her father King Brahmwell ( Ian McShane ) is trying to force her to marry Lord Roderick ( Stanley Tucci ). While Jack and Isabelle talk, one of the beans become wet, as the plant begin to grow. The whole house is lifted of the ground, with princess Isabelle trapped inside. Jack falls down, but manage to survive. Jack wakes up, and is questioned by the King Bramhwell army, where Isabelle is. Jack tells them she is stuck up there in the beanstalk. A team is assembled to rescue Isabelle, and Jack is told to go along. On their journey up in the sky, they are about to meet a new world no one thought existed.

As an adventure movie, Jack The Giant Slayer delivers enough action to please both a younger audience as well as grown ups. The biggest problem i constantly feel while watching, is that the acting could have been better. Especially from Nicholas Hault, he only made one movie i can remember, About A Boy, and he was just a young boy then. While he plays Jack, you get a sense that he must have had problems on the set, developing his character. The best part is when we finally get the giants attack, down on earth, where we get some nice battle scenes. The CGI effects are a bit messy sometimes, but overall it looks ok. Evan McGregor is one of the few actors in here that tries to fill the empty holes, and does a pretty good job. Overall, Jack And The Giant Slayer is what you expect it to be, an adventure for those who know the fairytale. Even with some flaws, i have a feeling this might work at the family dinner, or with your grandparents, if they still love old classic stories.

Rating: DDD