Item: Artemis Fowl
Rating: 4
Author: Matt Rooney

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

PLOT: Boy genius Artemis Fowl must come face-to-face with a hidden, magical world in order to find a mysterious and dangerous object and save his kidnapped father.

REVIEW: Within the first 30 minutes of watching the new Disney movie, ARTEMIS FOWL, I expect most people will start to wonder who exactly the movie is for – only for them to finish an hour later without ever getting a solid answer. As an adaptation of the first in a popular series of Young Adult novels that center on a 12-year-old and his dealings with a community of fairy tale creatures, adults may check out from the word go. But, it’s also very likely they’ll look over and see that, before long, the lack of adventure, ingenuity, visual dazzle and almost anything else engaging has caused even the least demanding of their young ones to fall asleep.

Perhaps that’s because FOWL – much like other movies of its kind – was made based on the prospect that there will be sequels to follow and that anything lacking in the first outing is meant to be course-corrected in future installments. The world-building is meant to expand, the stakes would get higher as the adventure blossoms, and the characters would grow more interesting as we journey with them. But that time is not here. What we have now is this first, painfully uninspired entry that has none of the thrills, wonder, or rich character development that should make wanting to explore the world of FOWL worthwhile in the first place.

Even the basic, more interesting aspects of young Artemis Fowl II’s personality from the books by Eoin Colfer aren’t present to provide some sort of twist on the typical child-hero tale. While here he is still a supreme genius – initially shown with the same kind of astute coldness of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes – what’s gone is the book's antihero criminal mastermind who kidnaps a Fairy cop named Holly Short to ransom her for a pile of her people’s gold, only to have a change of heart (and still get what he wanted all along). In its place in the movie version is Fowl (Ferdia Shaw) as a kid who feels ostracized and unseen by his peers and teachers, but who then has to use his smarts to find a mysterious, possibly world-ending treasure to save his father, also named Artemis Fowl (Colin Farrell), from a hooded figure who seems to be using one of those voice modulators that's probably cliche among kidnappers at this point. This is how Fowl comes into contact with Holly (Lara McDonnell) and the rest of the fairy tale world, which sparks an international dispute of sorts as they go back and forth about who should get the treasure and what it does — which is something along the lines of destroying the world or opening up a portal to a world of Orcs, I think. You've seen this song and dance before; it's shiny and dangerous.

With director Kenneth Branagh behind the wheel, he is once again in the same position as he was with another big-budget origin flick years ago — Marvel’s THOR. By that, I mean that despite there being a rich, colorful world and potentially interesting characters ripe for exploring within the story, the limitations of an earth-bound origin story means almost none of it gets to make it to the screen. While the Shakespearean family feuding and superhero action buoyed some of the more glaring flaws in THOR, Branagh has less to work with in FOWL. The drama that does occur between characters is listless and devoid of personality with a big ensemble given so little to work with from Conor McPherson and Hamish McColl’s jam-packed but short script. Reliably, Branagh gets good performances from the cast, but he just couldn't make the spark to ignite an exciting story.

And that right there is where I suspect the movie will fall flat with audiences: even with such rich material to work with, there is such a lack of energy and excitement that even simply having fun with the movie is hard to do. The Fairy world we’re briefly shown looks copy-pasted from any other sort of technologically advanced world in an expensive flick, and the action is short, scattered and more manic than entertaining. There’s less an abundance of magic and cleverness that the premise allows for, and many more mountains of exposition and world-building crammed into 90 minutes. It feels wrong to classify this as some sort of adventure story, because so much of it feels like the characters setting themselves up for something big and impactful to happen, only for it never to do so.

There’s so much in the way of different characters, beings, and human-fairy relations that no individual element ever gets a chance to shine, and we never get past the one-dimensional character traits of the important characters. Take young Artemis, our title character, as the most glaring example. A genius with unlimited potential, who at the beginning does show a glimmer of depth as he drops the cool façade when he gets honest with his dad. All of that fades when his dad is kidnapped, and from then on, it’s all about reading books on Fairies and Trolls and wondering how he’s going to get this deadly treasure. He doesn’t have meaningful conversations with anyone around him, nor do we see the weight of what’s happening take any sort of toll. He’s all about where’s the treasure and how does he get it. If he shows off his cleverness, it's through the occasional conversation where he gets to cooly toss out a line about being one step ahead of the Fairy army. And with so much jumping between characters, he hardly even feels like the main character of his own movie. By the end, dressed in his cool suit and shades, it’s hard to figure out what he was supposed to have learned, other than basic teamwork and proving he can mildly outsmart Fairy Judi Dench.

And as for the rest of the very able cast, none of them are being done many favors. Speaking of Dench, she’s given a role that makes less sense for her to have than being a CGI cat – doing a grizzled voice like a police captain who’s letting everyone know they’re too old for this shit. As for Farrell, he spends most of the time being held hostage on what looks like a decommissioned shipping vessel, quietly hanging there with his arms and legs covered in some sort of black, crystal mess. Nonso Anozie plays Domovoi Butler, the Fowls' servant and bodyguard who has an endless plethora of skills we hardly get to see utilized. It also wouldn’t be a modern Disney movie without Josh Gad being in the mix, and in a way I can only describe as sublime, he is both the movie’s strangest element and a sort of saving grace. Like Dench, he also does a questionable grizzled voice, and if that rubs you the wrong way, then strap in, because he’s also the movie’s unnecessary narrator. It's like the mixture of Rubeus Hagrid and Josh Gad no one asked for. But to credit Gad, in a movie wreaking with so much blandness, he’s the one aspect that provides some humor and high strangeness. If you think you’ve seen it all, just wait till you see the magic of visual effects allow Gad to unhinge his jaw, and proceed to tunnel through into the ground as dirt shoots out his ass.

By the end, when friendships have been made and the team is assembled — because there always needs to be a team assembling — we're left on the cusp of a budding adventure that screams to the audience, "Wait to tune in next time when things will certainly be much better!" The problem is I can't ever see that next time materializing, because I can't see anyone, young or old, really caring about what happens with these characters or the ensuing fight on the horizon. There's just nothing here that earns your investment for future movies, or even in the movie's short runtime. The stakes are inconsequential, the characters either wasted or dull, the world generic and colorless, and however clever our lead character is, this movie certainly is not.