Seventh Son

You have to admire a movie which takes a gold-star cast (Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Alicia Vikander) and creates such an unpolishable turd.

Oscar-winners Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore deliver two of the hammiest performances of their distinguished careers in Sergei Bodrov's overcooked sword-and-sorcery fantasy.

It's a real problem when one of your leading characters sounds like a cross between Bane, the masked mutterer from The Dark Knight Rises, and a man competing in a hard-boiled-egg-eating contest.

It's lively and daft, and you find yourself wondering: all this expertise, and the best anybody could think to do with it was this?

Would it even have been improved if we could actually hear the dialogue? Probably not.

You leave the cinema wishing you'd understood even less of it than you did.

If anyone needs proof of the "Oscar curse", here's Exhibit A.

It's also near impossible to enjoy this movie without visions of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones dancing through your head.

Seventh Son is a pretty by-the-book fantasy tale. The young apprentice storyline is a common one, so there aren't a lot of surprises when it comes to the plot. For me...it depends on the execution, and this is where I think the movie succeeds...mostly

Fantasy with very little imagination.