There’s a word for movies like Artemis Fowl, and that word is… “bad.”

Based on the series of books from the 2000s – a time chock full of novels about kids thrust into otherworldly adventures in the wake of Harry Potter – Artemis Fowl was released on Disney+ in June 2020, and became just the latest in a long line of live-action fantasy/sci-fi movies from Disney that ends up failing in execution.

I never read any of the Artemis Fowl books, so I can’t make any direct comparison to the source material. But general consensus seems to be that the film strays far from the books, which I think it’s safe to assume means the books are much better than this mess of a movie.

The story here is that Artemis Fowl II (Ferdia Shaw), son of filthy rich antique collector Artemis Fowl I (Colin Farrell), is a super genius. He even cloned a goat at age ten (why the film feels the need to point this out, I don’t know. Especially since the film fails at making the obvious gag of having the cloned goat be Artemis’s family pet). One day, Artemis’s father goes missing, and news breaks out that reveals the elder Fowl to be a world-class criminal mastermind, with many of his collected antiques and fortune being the product of several high profile heists.

Oh, and also there’s an underground fairy world where Elves, Dwarves and Goblins live in secret. But Artemis’s father knew of this fairy world and stole several magic artifacts from their world so they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands or something. And it turns out his kidnapper is a wanted fugitive in the fairy world, though this villain’s motives are some of the most vaguely defined I can recall in a movie.

I suppose that’s par for the course here, considering Artemis Fowl is barely defined himself. Despite being the film’s hero, his only real defining trait is his obnoxious arrogance (is it asking too much to see a humble genius in a movie for once?). Also his butler Dom (Nonso Anozie) doubles as a bodyguard. Also also, said butler’s niece Juliet (Tamara Smart) is Artemis’s best friend, but the film forgets about her for such long stretches of time that, on the rare occasion she does show up, the audience would be forgiven for not remembering she was ever a part of the proceedings. Then there’s an Elf girl named Holly Short (Lara McDonnell), whom Artemis ends up taking hostage in exchange for the Elves to procure some magic artifact that the bad guy wants so he can trade it for his father’s freedom.

What’s weird is that the majority of the film takes place in and around the Fowls’ mansion. Some early scenes deviate away to show us the underground fairy world, but once the important magic characters come to the surface, the movie is almost entirely centered around a single location. That in itself isn’t a terrible thing, but doesn’t this seem like the wrong kind of movie to do that with? Here’s a movie telling us that there’s a whole other world beneath the Earth, but almost all the action takes place at one building. Artemis Fowl kind of reminds me of Glass in that regard, a movie begging to stretch its legs but feels shackled to one confined space.

Among the film’s few highlights are the presence of Dame Judi Dench as the Elf commander Julius Root, and Josh Gad as an oversized Dwarf named Mulch Diggums. But both actors are wasted in this movie, and for some reason both of their characters tend to speak in gravely whispers (something which Gad’s character even makes a joke about). I did enjoy the joke about David Bowie being from the fairy world, though.

One of the biggest issues with Artemis Fowl is its overall structure and pacing. The best way I can describe Artemis Fowl is that it’s a movie that plays out like a clip show episode of a sitcom, where a half baked plot would segue into various clips of past episodes. But there’s not even a half baked story holding the clips together here, and the clips in question just exist in a vacuum, so they just kind of happen. So we have a series of things being thrown at the screen that are only connected by the characters… characters that we never get to know anything about because the movie is already throwing something else at us before anything about them can be established.

Sadly, you can’t even say the film is salvaged on a visual level. Because, despite being a visual effects heavy picture, Artemis Fowl is an ugly movie.

I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it seems whenever Disney attempts to make live-action fantasy or sci-fi epics, the results always blow up in Disney’s face. The only movie in this sub-category of Disney that I enjoyed in recent memory was Tomorrow Land, and even that had the same unappealing aesthetic as the rest of them (and was a notorious box office bomb). I don’t know how to explain it, but whenever Disney tries their hand at live-action fantasy or sci-fi, it just looks wrong.

The CG in Artemis Fowl looks well behind the times, with a rampaging troll looking especially 2001-esque. And the aesthetics as a whole just never look convincing. Artemis Fowl is aiming for something like Harry Potter, but looks more akin to The Santa Clause 2. The Elves look like they wear Party City versions of the Green Goblin’s costume from Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man, Josh Gad’s character looks like he’s cosplaying in a homemade Hagrid costume, and the villain has their face shrouded in a hood, but brings to mind a Power Rangers villain of the week more so than Emperor Palpatine. At its best times, Artemis Fowl looks garish. At its worst, it’s just unpleasant to look at.

With the way the movie wraps up, you know Disney had hopes this would lead to a series of sequels and they’d have another money-making franchise on their hands. But Artemis Fowl ends up being a cinematic cacophony: it’s nonsensically structured, the characters are paper thin, all of its events just kind of stumble over each other, its a visual effects heavy movie that fails to deliver any memorable visual effects, and the crossover between criminal mastermind espionage and traditional fantasy never once meshes, instead feeling like two unrelated entities just collided headfirst into each other. So in the end, Artemis Fowl is an origin story that is destined to lead nowhere, making the film as a whole one of its own random clips pulled from a nonexistent show.

They may have spelled it differently, but “foul” is right.

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Author: themancalledscott

Born of cold and winter air and mountain rain combining, the man called Scott is an ancient sorcerer from a long-forgotten realm. He’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil. Or, you know, he could just be some guy who loves video games, animations and cinema who just wanted to write about such things. View all posts by themancalledscott