The Last Witch Hunter

And Narratives

If there’s anything Vin Diesel loves, it’s LORE. As I’ve mentioned before, a prominent element to being in prison is surrendering to hours and hours of basic cable. And many of you know this, but you’re not intimately aware of this: basic cable is a cesspool of endlessly-repeating, indistinguishable CGI blockbuster movies. So yes, I’m glad I can be here to talk about “Hard To Be A God” or “Aftersun”. But because of prison, I have also memorized all the dialogue from “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”, “Kong: Skull Island” and “Skyscraper”.

Which is why I now have an advanced degree in Vin Diesel’s Fastology. I have seen all of the “Fast And Furious” movies, repeatedly, enough that I can recite the series lore in the way Biblical scholars can tell you about the Last Supper. In prison I saw “Furious 7” (2015), “The Fate Of The Furious” (2017) and “F9” (2021), while also making time for the not-Diesel-approved “Hobbs And Shaw” (2019), and I watched these in cable perpetuity alongside the preceding films in the series. My Stockholm Syndrome is so severe that, as a free man, I paid to see 2023’s “Fast X”, and I look forward to the possibly-not-happening eleventh installment that would pay off a not-inconsiderable amount of dangling plot threads.

As the “Fast” franchise has continued, it’s clear Diesel, as an executive producer, has taken steps to enrich the “lore”. For six movies, it was a buddy act with him and the late Paul Walker. With Walker’s passing, Diesel has clearly made an attempt to foreground the elaborate Dom Toretto mythology, which since the seventh film (the last to feature Walker’s Brian O’Connor) has involved the loss of his wife, the resurrection and rekindling of an old love, the birth of a nephew named after Brian, the reveal of a terrorist brother (who then performs a heel turn) and the existence of a grandmother played by Rita Moreno. “F9” spends a considerable amount of flashback time on Toretto in his youth to retcon how much his brother was involved in his own origins. And it’s believed Justin Lin, who had previously directed half (!) of the movies in this series, left during production on the tenth film because of the increasingly-elaborate plan to tie the villain, Jason Momoa’s Dante, into Dom’s backstory (I believe the original discarded idea was to establish blood ties between Dante and Dom). Vin Diesel: a FIEND for lore.

Which brings us to “The Last Witch Hunter”, a movie that feels like a passion project for Diesel and a chore for everyone else. If you believe the “lore”, Diesel developed this project as an adaptation of his own creative work, specifically the character he originated for a series of Dungeons And Dragons campaigns over the years. I suppose it’s telling that 1) If you’ve seen this movie, you could probably assume a backstory like that, and 2) Diesel does not actually receive a writing credit for this movie. It’s interesting that Diesel was so intimately tied to his character that he devised a movie around him, and yet the prevailing sense of this guy’s personality is “stoic”.

Diesel’s Kaulder is the titular hunter of witches, a guy who has been around long enough that he’s got a big unconvincing cat-hair beard in flashbacks. A witch killed his family and conveniently cursed him with eternal life, so now he goes around killing all witches. A not-at-all-ominous religious sect called Axe and Cross has employed him over the eras to take out witches. His envoy of sorts is Sir Michael Caine – these actors don’t have much chemistry on-screen because no one here does, it’s just that kind of movie. But it’s worth it if it meant that we now have this delightful Diesel/Caine relationship in real life.

Caine’s got a descendant, a pastor played by Elijah Wood, who is now going to assist him in this latest and darkest witch threat – there’s some nonsense about a prophecy, some curses, end of the world, bla bla bla. Kaulder ends up recruiting a super sexy redhead in black leather to help him (Rose Leslie), because the manual says that’s probably what should happen. They also never really have an intimate moment, most likely due to the rules of the manual. There’s not a lot of sex in Dungeons and Dragons, I think. Anyway, Rose Leslie looks incredible in this movie, and Diesel barely sneezes in her direction. I mean, maybe he could have had eyes for Elijah Wood, and what an interesting movie that would have been. This remind me of how I first tried Dungeons and Dragons in prison. My attempts to make my character get interested in anything other than “the mission” were frowned upon. I had to sail the river Styx at one point, and insisted on my turns that my character start singing songs from Styx. I don’t know why anyone has anything against “Mr. Roboto” but alas.

Diesel hasn’t worked much outside of the “Fast And Furious” franchise, which likely means he wasn’t taking on any projects in which he didn’t have a vested interest. Which explains how this one is directed by the personality-less pushover Breck Eisner, literally the image you see when you look up Nepo-Baby in the dictionary, enough so that it’s actually the only picture in the dictionary. Eisner made his directorial debut with “Sahara”, a Matthew McConaughey adventure movie that lost hundreds of millions of dollars. From there, he landed the job of remaking George A. Romero’s still-timely “The Crazies”, turning a heavily-political horror movie into a generic zombie picture. So of course you’d want a guy like that on set to merely follow every gravely-voiced demand that Diesel was making. Eisner hasn’t directed since. I’m sure the son of Michael Eisner is doing just fine.

Every performance reaches only for somnambulance, particularly Diesel, who thinks immortality and action movie one-liner are inseparable mates. Only Joe Gilgun (“Preacher”) stands out as having any real personality in a standout sequence – of course, he’s dealt with so we can get back to more Diesel brooding. Eisner gives this movie a look that can be called Mid-Budget Slop. It’s the sort of look you see in movies that have sizable money behind them, but not enough to reasonably be called blockbusters. A lot of YA adaptations from that period sport the same visuals. Usually, you’ll see a lot of opportunities to employ CGI fog, because it covers up whatever unfinished effects are actually in the shot. A movie like this, you’d think there’d be at least a few cool practical effects, some neat prosthetic work and makeup. Guillermo Del Toro, with more or less the same money, made two “Hellboy” movies almost a decade earlier, and they look incredible. You get the sense “The Last Witch Hunter” may have set a much lower target. Maybe, for you, it’s a bullseye. I doubt it.

I thought a lot about storytelling in prison. There are not a lot of really great storytellers in there. Out of boredom, I got involved in a couple of quickly-aborted games of Dungeons and Dragons. It seemed to me like a game that could really work if your Dungeon Master, your DM, was a natural storyteller. Of course, the men I played with had no real gift for this, they only learned from video games. I read a couple of books written by people in prison, books that were just endless laundry lists of “And then that happened,” “And then this happened”. There was one white collar fella who was working on a book about investing, how you can become a better investor if you did so barefoot, because pseudoscience. Supposedly, the book dissolved into varied complaints about the man’s own incarceration, as well as diatribes about how the world is headed towards a dark path because of liberals. It had already eclipsed 800 pages. I’m actively mad I never got my hands on the work-in-progress.

But the nature of storytelling often gets lost among people who have never done it. When you’re telling a story, you have to build a theme that leads towards a narrative arc. Characters need to learn things, they need to grow. They need to become better people, or they need to think they become better people, so the reader can understand something about themselves. It’s a way of envisioning an ideal world based on your moral understandings. I’m surprised there are no classes or seminars in prison about this. All those incarcerated people with all that time to write? You can give these men a reason to see the world in a new light than the one they used to commit crime. You’re telling me that Peacock can’t have their own writer’s workshop in prison, teach inmates how to tell stories, and after a year not come away with at least one viable pilot? I’m 10% kidding.