The new Disney movie Artemis Fowl was released this weekend on Disney+. It was scheduled to be a big(ish) theatrical release but, due to COVID, went streaming… but not even a paid rental or purchase. The flick is based on the first of a series of novels about a child criminal genius… but this, being a Disney flick, kind of flattens out the kid so he’s not quite the anti-hero he was in the book.
Artemis Fowl is about a rich Irish kid genius who is surprised to learn that his dad, who has gone missing, is an international thief. He quickly is told by his manservant that there’s a secret Faery kingdom at the center of the Earth in which might be a clue as to why his dad is missing. They kidnap a Faery cop (a member of the L.E.P. Recon) and soon the entire police force is at their doorstep.
This movie is a shrug. I saw it on Friday and just couldn’t work up the interest or thoughts to bother writing about it til Sunday. I’m not going to say it’s boring per say… but it’s not exciting or interesting either. It’s just blandly there. A generic fantasy that’s not saying or doing much of anything unique. There just seems to be a bunch of other movie ideas embedded in it and it doesn’t do anything super interesting of its own.
Part of the problem is that it feels like this movie was murdered in the editing room. There’s a fairly large number of really clumsy, abrupt edits that looks like someone took a pair of scissors to the (digital) film reel. And there’s waaay too much narration from Josh Gad’s character… like they are trying to fill in details and add world building that might have been lost when whole sequences of exposition were cut. It’s hard to say what happened… it just feels hacked up.
The movie does look good, at least. The special effects of the high tech faery city are nice and some of the other effects in the human world work as well. Sometimes some things look overly CGI but no worse than most blockbusters, to be fair.
The acting is ok… the kid they got to play Artemis Fowl is new and he kind of gets the job done. Unfortunately, he also vanishes into the background in the second half of his own movie. Instead Josh Gad and Dame Judi Dench (as the hard boiled faery police chief) seem to have more screen time (and they chew on their dialog with weird gravelly voices). The young lady who plays the kidnapped elf cop is a fresh face who does good work.
So… overall I think this flick went to Disney+ in order to dump it somewhere and say it was released. It probably would have been a bit of a flop if it released theatrically so this probably saved Disney some egg on its face. I guess if you have Disney+ and are interested in the source material (and don’t mind changes to plot and character) or like fantasy movies in general, it might be worth trying. I wouldn’t go out of my way. A lot of people hate the flick and I can’t argue with them… I just didn’t think it was THAT bad… I mean, it’s still a shrug of indifference though.
Score: 72