Joe Breci

More like Artemis Foul...amiright?! Artemis Fowl is everything that is wrong with Hollywood and with Disney owning so much of the movie industry. I googled Artemis Fowl today after watching it on Disney + and as of right now it is showing the movie has a 155 minute runtime. On the app...the movie I saw only had about an 85 minute runtime. There is 70 minutes...one hour and ten minutes of this movie missing. And it totally shows. The movie has been in development hell for years and it's a shame really. Kenneth Brannagh is directing. Dame Judy Dench, Josh Gadd, Colin Farrell...the movie is stacked with talent. It's all wasted and frittered away though. Judy Dench and Josh Gadd are given these weird gravely Tom Waits gargling hot asphalt voices, Colin Farrell pops in to teach us all a lesson...its all very weird. Meanwhile, at 85 minutes the movie spends 40 minutes(yes, literally 40 minutes) on special effects garbage sequences and the rest chasing an acorn shaped Maguffin that means nothing. The movie doesn't care about the books. You could call the movie Dougie Day and the Acorn Thief and no one would really draw any comparisons to the Fowl books. And Artemis himself was a joke. In the begining of the movie he is established as a genius wunderkid (hah)with daddy issues(read:almost every Disney movie ever) but he just comes off as an annoying tool. None of his brilliance is earned...he just knows a lot of stuff...deal with it. It's essential to what's there of the plot. Without giving away the 2 or 3 plot points let me just say...this movie is bad. And like I said above, it is everything that is wrong with the movies today. Disney knows they own most of the movie industry and they have the formula down on how to do the absolute bare minimum to make X amount of dollars off one of their films. The cast is filled with Marvel wannabe's waiting for their shot, or Marvel castoffs waiting for their sequel to start shooting and whatever teen sensation is melting the Disney Channel airwaves with their grandiose overacting panache. This movie makes me angry. It makes me angry because I know the book series is beloved and there is genuinely a good story in there. Disney chose to ignore that though in favor of their gross saccharine manufactured movie style. It'll sell great on Blu-ray though and they'll make their money back and give us Artemis Fowl 2 and the Sequel No one Wanted.