More than a year ago, we saw the first trailer for Seventh Son, a young adult fantasy flick starring Jeff Bridges and Ben Barnes. Then the film got caught in the crossfire during the epic Warner Brothers/Legendary divorce, and Seventh Son was delayed. Now it is in the hands of Universal, and finally has its second trailer. I’ll warn you now though to brace yourselves, as this one looks spectacularly bad.
Ben Barnes is the titular hero, a prophesied wielder of great powers now residing in a land of magic and legend. He meets “the sole remaining warrior of a mystical order” (Jeff Bridges, sporting a wizard-y beard), leaves his livelihood as a farmhand, and joins up with the wise old mage to battle an evil dark queen (Julianne Moore). In between there will be CGI monsters of every description, Jeff Bridges will put on an inexplicable accent, and I will wonder just how many fantasy cliches can be packed into a single trailer.
The current preview for Seventh Son is a slight improvement on the first one, which drew out the badness to epic proportions. Now Bridges and Moore at least look like they are having fun in their respective roles, even if Barnes has the wide-eyed surprise of a deer caught in the headlights. But with a runtime of only two minutes, I was bored halfway through the trailer. There is nothing new here; in fact, every single line is so cliched that I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for this to prove to be an elaborate send-up of the fantasy genre. Maybe that’s what it is – I suppose we can all hope – but somehow I get the impression that director Sergei Bodrov is in earnest.
Seventh Son will come to theaters on February 26, 2015, when you will pay premium prices to watch this in 3D. You can check out the latest trailer below and marvel at how the mighty have fallen.