Based on the 2001 young adult fantasy novel by Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl has had a very interesting production history. It’s been in development for over 15 years, but kept having financial issues. It wasn’t until 2015 that director Kenneth Branagh was hired to helm the project. It was then delayed several times; originally set for a release on August 9, 2019, then delayed to May 29, 2020, before getting pushed again due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, the film finally sees the light of day on Disney’s streaming platform, which really feels like Disney accepting defeat. The pre-release trailers garnered negative reactions from audiences, and various news sources cast doubts on the film being a success. By sticking it on Disney+, the studio is essentially getting rid of a project that had very little hope of success rather than waiting for a major release. And after viewing it, it’s easy to see why they did that. Artemis Fowl is a true failure of fantasy filmmaking. It squanders any potential it had as a franchise-starter by ignoring much of its own source material. Instead, we get scene after scene of Hollywood blockbuster clichés. Fans won’t appreciate how little the film uses from the original books and non-fans won’t have any idea what’s going on because the story is so sloppily constructed. The adventure follows the titular Artemis (newcomer Ferdia Shaw), son of a very wealthy antiques dealer (Colin Farrell). He is an intellectual prodigy who has already accomplished many scientific feats despite being only 12. Throughout his life, his father told him stories of a magical world populated by fairies, dwarves, and trolls but Artemis only believes them to be myths. He never anticipated them to be true. After his father is kidnapped by a mysterious villain, Artemis receives the offer of a trade: his father for a powerful fairy artifact that he stole. With the help of his loyal bodyguard Dom (Nonso Anozie), Artemis sets off to find the artifact and save his dad. This causes them to cross paths with two unlikely allies; Holly Short (Lara McDonnell), a skilled agent of the fairy police force, and Mulch Diggums (Josh Gad), a giant dwarf thief. They all must work together to recover the artifact before other fairy forces get it first. It sounds like an epic adventure filled with large set pieces but it is not. That’s really the film’s biggest mistake. The entirety of the story plays out in more or less one location: Artemis’s home. The movie establishes an expansive, magical world that’s only used for several brief subplots that don’t further the main story at all. Other than that, we’re stuck in one small area for basically the whole runtime. The movie also suffers from a frustrating lack of story. Despite being 95 minutes long, there’s not much that actually happens. For the first 40 minutes, the characters either stare at computers or journals or bounce around in useless action scenes before the real action only slightly amps up. From there, we’re treated to a hostage situation that takes up the rest of the film. There’s so little actually happening that, even with a short running time, it feels like a joyless slog. The cast certainly doesn’t help. They can’t even make this stupid fun with their lackluster, campy portrayals of the characters. Newcomer Ferdia Shaw has little to do despite being the main character and what he does is almost hard to watch. Both he and McDonnell look completely lifeless, never showing any true emotion. Sadly, it’s Josh Gad who gives one of the worst performances. He looks as if he already knows the film is bad, so he doesn’t even try. Not only is he very underused in the role, he’s also overused as the film’s unnecessary narrator whose only purpose is to over-explain the film to kids. Half the time his exposition dumps don’t make sense because he gives detailed explanations for things he wasn’t present for. Much like other live-action Disney efforts, the studio opts to use CGI on literally everything, even when it’s completely unnecessary. And for a movie made for about $125 million, it looks unfinished. The effects take a noticeable dip in quality as the film goes along with scenes that are supposed to be beautiful ending up looking messy. But in the end, it’s the script that fails the most. Writers Conor McPherson and Hamish McColl (and probably several uncredited rewriters) can’t commit to the basic rules they’ve established, and can’t even keep motivations coherent from scene to scene. Characters who are supposed to be villains in one scene suddenly become allies in the next. Other characters and plans simply vanish into nowhere as we get down towards the end. Even the film’s central artifact that sends Artemis on his search is never clearly defined throughout and ends up becoming a blatant deus ex machina that makes no sense. It’s hard to explain more without giving away too many spoilers, although I’ve already done that. Artemis Fowl feels more like a feature length prologue rather than an epic fantasy adventure. It shamelessly steals from other blockbuster films to build its world, is populated by a terrible cast, and has nothing going on for most of it, culminating in an ending that resolves absolutely nothing but setting up sequels that will probably never happen. With the hundreds of hours of content available on Disney+, there’s are much better viewing options to watch other than this.
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