Jack the Giant Slayer

Over the weekend I went and saw Jack the Giant Slayer. While this is a familiar story I was hoping it would be re-envisioned for today's viewers. I did not go in with many expectations (just one that I'll get to later), I was not pleasantly surprised with the final result. While the poster suggests that the female character in the story is going to be strong and capable, in the film she consistently screams "Jack!" and acts very helpless. He continually has to come to her rescue because he's the "hero" of the story. It's kind of like a neanderthal wrote this script. I don't understand why fantasy films continue to have such weak female characters. Even the spineless villain fought better than she did.

Another complaint I had was the illogical or rather the unprepared response the kingdom has to the giants. Supposedly these giants had attacked the kingdom before but this castle was not prepared to fight this foe again. There were no giant walls, and most of their weaponry was pointless. I mean, they arrowed a guy until he fell into the fiery moat but he still survived. These people didn't even have a catapult. How unlikely is that? They did have a rapid-fire archery machine. Well they had two of those until the giants took them out with a slingshot. The majority of the battle was a tug of war over the drawbridge during which no one shot fiery arrows (even though they shot them into the moat to ignite the oil they dumped in the water) and very few arrows were shot before and after the momentary appearance of the rapid-fire archery machine. The arrows should have been flying constantly it was almost as if they had few military tactics and it was surprising that a big group of anyone hadn't taken over the kingdom prior to this point.

The only saving grace of this film (and my one expectation) was that Ewan McGregor was awesome.

 Okay, so I know he can never do any wrong and this film is clearly not of the same caliber of "Beginners" and "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen" but he still brought the charm, humor and adorableness that makes him consistently the standout in a film.

Long story short, I probably wouldn't recommend this film to anyone unless they were big fans of the main actors or they wanted to know how not to write a female character in a fantasy.