It turns out that Tom has fallen in love with Alice – a reluctant witch with wavering family loyalty – while Gregory is revealed to have had a bit of a history with Malkin herself, one that the dangerous witch may still be too bitter about for comfort. Vowing revenge on the land, Malkin mobilizes her supporters - among them her sister Bony Lizzie (Antje Traue) and Lizzie’s daughter Alice Deane (Alicia Vikander).īut as Gregory and Tom – accompanied by their trusty ‘abhuman’ sidekick Tusk (John DeSantis) race against time to stop Malkin and her guerrilla army of witches, monsters and ghouls, things get a trifle more personal. In this case, the scourge comes in the form of Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore) – a powerful witch who escapes celestial captivity after possessing the body of a child. Lowly peasant Tom Ward (Ben Barnes) is called upon by the grizzled old ‘spook’ John Gregory (Jeff Bridges), a knight-cum-exorcist-cum-wizard, to fulfill his destiny as the ‘seventh son of the seventh son’ – a hereditary line of witch hunters charged with the keeping the – predictably medieval – land safe from supernatural invasion.
Any film that announces itself with the lines, “My power returns with the rise of the blood moon,” is bound to be cheesier than a buffet fondue, and Seventh Son certainly doesn’t disappoint on that front, making good on its promise to deliver an over the top swords-and-sorcery romp that parties like it’s 1985 – tapping the same vein that gave us the likes of Willow (1988) and Ladyhawke (1985), and conveniently forgetting how Peter Jackson raised the bar for the genre with The Lord of the Rings adaptations in the early noughties.īut now that Jackson himself has dropped the ball with overstretched, overindulgent and messy Hobbit prequels, and given how sleek but soulless reboots and comic book adaptations are the order of the day at the multiplex these days, I ask: is going back in time to the delightfully corny 80s such a bad thing after all?īased on the first of a series of novels by Joseph Delaney, Seventh Son – not to be confused with the Iron Maiden song of the same name, though it does share that heavy metal band's affinity for fantasy-and-folklore culled grand theatrics – is a tale as old as time, one whose model you will recognize from Star Wars and other ‘hero’ narratives in popular culture before and since.
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