Happy New Year! The first movie for yours truly to watch is… Seventh Son, which I was quite excited about since Mr Cutie Pie aka Ben Barnes is the lead actor in this seemingly epic movie. Key word: seemingly.

Seventh Son tells the story of The Spook played by Jeff Bridges who was tasked to kill the most powerful witch, Mother Malkin (the ever beautiful Julianne Moore), assisted by an apprentice, who was the seventh son of a seventh son. One apprentice after another was killed and Mother Malkin walked away free. The Spook then traveled to find the Ward family and met Thomas Ward (Ben Barnes), the seventh son in the family. He left the home with The Spook and went on their way to kill Mother Malkin, who was getting stronger by the day.

I know that my summary above was pretty, well, thin. But that’s exactly how the plot feels like – thin. With the beautiful set and scenery, I felt that it could have given the audience something more. I love simple stories but this is too simple – so simple that I felt that there are so many missing gaps in the story. I understand that Thomas had just one week to learn as much as he could from The Spook to kill Mother Malkin. But there was nothing else there. There was no buildup to that such as sword-fighting. He just managed to do all that in the end with the help of a little something-something, which I shall not mentioned because SPOILER. All I saw was him practicing his aiming skills using a knife and writing notes. Also, with stories such as this, i.e. average boy/girl turned hero/heroine, there was always the struggle between good and bad and grappling with shocking family secrets and deaths. There would be lots of emotions into play making the audience at the edge of their seats. None here. There was a minor character’s death which was someone very close to the main character but it took the main character just minutes to get over it. Minutes. Honestly, if someone close to me died, it would take me days or weeks to get over it, witches be damned.

It feels like there is nothing positive about the movie from the above but as mentioned, it has beautiful settings and scenery, which just made this movie more disappointing. It has all the potential to be epic but the plot just fell flat.

Julianne Moore was brilliant as the evil villain. But with Jeff Bridges as The Spook, though he’s awesome, half the time I felt like there need to be subtitles whenever he talked because I don’t understand him. It could be part of his character but still. I was excited for Ben Barnes to be playing a lead role in a movie and he has all the looks and appeal to play a hero (I mean, Prince Caspian, hello!) but I just wish there was more. He gives the best he could with what he has and I put the blame solely on the writing rather than the actors here.

All in all, if you have not watched the movie and planning to, maybe just wait for it to be played on TV.

I give this movie a 2.5 out of 5. It’s not epic but it’s not so bad it made you cringe either. It’s just disappointing.

(Side note: After reading comments on YouTube, I believe this was based on a book called The Last Apprentice by Joseph Delaney but the movie did not follow the book much, if at all? If this is true, and I think it is since a lot of people commented about it, then this is more disappointing. The book seems to be in series just like Harry Potter, so it is even more dreadful because imagine putting 7 books of Harry Potter into one movie. Yeah, not a good idea.)

The trailer…