Seventh Son is a comfort blanket of a movie. It doesn’t challenge and it doesn’t revolutionize. It’s just a yellowed fantasy novel that’s worth reading in the shade of a leafy tree on a warm summer day.
You will find here the dashing hero (Ben Barnes), the grizzled sage (Jeff Bridges), the all-powerful villain (Julianne Moore) and lots of cool giant monsters. There will be magical amulets, lots of exposition about the supernatural and just enough moral ambiguity to make these creatures seem like mighty threats and misunderstood beasts in equal measure. It won’t inspire a new generation of fantasy lovers but it will appease the existing ones, and entertain them from beginning to end.
Tom Ward (Barnes) is the seventh son of a seventh son, and in this medieval land that means he’s destined to become a caretaker of magical monsters, killing them when necessary and defending them if the situation calls for it. It sounds like a pretty cool job, but he only has a few weeks to become an expert. A malevolent witch named Mother Malkin (Moore) has escaped from her prison and she’s raising an army to vanquish the human race, who to be fair are usually depicted as stupid, racist dickbags.
Check Out: Ben Barnes Talks ‘Seventh Son’ on The B-Movies Podcast
Jeff Bridges does his damnedest to steal the movie, but his latest attempt at an unforgettable accent backfires, making it hard to figure out what the heck he’s saying a lot of the time. Fortunately, the plot of Seventh Son is simple enough it might as well be a silent movie. Good guys are good, bad guys are bad, and there’s just enough baggage between them that we start to wonder if beating the hell out of witches and dragons with whomping sticks is really entirely necessary by the action-packed finale. Can’t we all just get along?
But the twinge of sensitivity towards its monsters doesn’t stop Seventh Son from feeling like a perfectly decent, albeit largely unremarkable entry in the sword and sorcery genre. To say that you’ve seen it all before would probably be fair, but the fantasy genre hasn’t thrived for this long by failing to live up to its audience’s expectations. You don’t go into a slasher without expecting a masked killer to murder nubile teenagers, and you don’t go into a fantasy epic without expecting a certain amount of straightforward derring-do. And you’ll get it right here.
Let me put it this way: if you loved Krull, you will at least “like” Seventh Son. The same goes for Beastmaster, Dragonslayer, Ladyhawke, The Sword and the Sorcerer and Willow. Those of us who are content with an old-fashioned adventure set in a world of kick-ass monsters that doesn’t challenge the mind, but doesn’t disappoint, will be perfectly happy with how Seventh Son turned out.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
