It's Jack the Giant Slayer, or Jack the Giant Killer as it was formerly called. It takes Jack and the Beanstalk and Jack the Giant Killer, two different yet similar sounding fairy tales, and makes them one. It's not that bad of a film, but it's no milestone in film-making either.
Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is the farm-boy dreaming of a better life. Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) is the princess who wants to escape from her father's control. One day, Jack goes to town to sell the horse and gets some beans instead. That night, the Princess seeks shelter from the rain in Jack's house. Of course, that's when the beans grow into the beanstalk that takes the Princess up high and leaves Jack down low.
The next day, the King (Ian McShane) enlists Jack to join the Knights on a quest to save the Princess. Up in the clouds, they find the Kingdom of Giants, who are just waiting to eat them.
In director Bryan Singer's early summer blockbuster, the best scenes are its first. It goes back and forth between Jack and Isabelle so seamlessly it's a bit ingenious. In the rest of the film, most of the characters are so summer stock that they're not memorable. One exception is the human villain, Roderick (Stanley Tucci), a sneaky ham who gets offed way too soon.
As for its obligatory blockbuster effects, they're OK at best. The growing beanstalks are amazing displays of CGI wizardry, and the motion-capture giants are adequately ugly. There were times, though, when the CGI effects stood out for the wrong reason: they were too obviously CGI.
Overall, Jack the Giant Slayer is simply nothing more than a film to entertain an audience for an afternoon. When summer arrives for real, let's hope that it's blockbusters will be a lot more memorable than this.
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