Artemis Fowl Parent Guide

Young Artemis Fowl (Ferdia Shaw) is smarter at age 12 than almost anybody in the world. He’s a master chess player, award-winning architect, and all-around genius. The world is his oyster. But when his father, Artemis Fowl Sr. (Colin Farrell) is mysteriously kidnapped by a rogue fairy, he hatches an elaborate scheme to get his father back. With the help of his manservant/bodyguard, Domovoi Butler (Nonso Anozie), the younger Fowl uncovers the existence of a magical underworld, and even kidnaps the unfortunate fairy Captain Holly Short (Lara McDonnell) as part of his plan to secure his father’s return. As he is about to learn, crime is a dangerous enterprise…

Adaptations are always a perilous ground. As someone who thoroughly enjoyed the original novels by Eoin Colfer, I was pessimistic from the start that this would turn out well. I am a lifelong member of “The Book Was Better” club and am notoriously hard to please. To guard against my biases, I watched this movie with someone who has no attachment to the books. She shared my very low opinion of the movie, and I am therefore confident that what follows is a reasonable assessment of the film, and not just a reflection of my devotion to the novels.

I hesitate to use words like “unwatchable”, or “festering dumpster of misbegotten ideas and incomplete plot points”, or “deliberate mangling of enjoyable source material”, but all three apply in spades to this “film”. Despite the fact that the original book has more than enough action, intrigue, and tongue-in-cheek dialogue to keep any movie on track, the filmmakers have discarded almost all of the actual plot and characters. Instead, they threw the names and a few locations from the book into a sack, chucked in some vague verbs and action set-pieces, shook thoroughly, and took what came out as a script.

What is truly bizarre about this – or, at least, one of the many bizarre things about this - is that author Eoin Colfer was heavily involved in production and allegedly signed off on these changes. I respect the universe Colfer created in his eight book series and I’m honestly mystified as to why he would endorse this tire fire of misinterpreted ideas.

I love Kenneth Branagh, and many of his directorial efforts are reasonably successful, so I’m not entirely sure what happened here. Given his not inconsiderable talents, I can’t imagine an explanation for how this film went so badly wrong. The characters are flat and uninteresting, the acting is excruciatingly bad, and the script is confused at best. If that weren’t enough, the computer effects are pretty cheap and noticeably rubbery for much of the film. Given the talents of the Mouse House, there is absolutely no excuse for such incredibly sloppy work. If this were an indie film, made on home computers, it would be forgivable. But coming from Disney, it’s completely unacceptable. Maybe your eight year old will enjoy this, but that’s no reason for you to sit through it. You could have more fun sealing your feet in cement and jumping into a lake – that’s pretty much what watching this movie feels like, but without the refreshing feel of cool water on a sunny day.