
Seventh Son
SEVENTH SON
2014, Fantasy/Adventure, 1h 42m
TOMATOMETER122 Reviews
AUDIENCE SCORE50,000+ Ratings
WHAT TO KNOW
CRITICS CONSENSUS
Seventh Son squanders an excellent cast and some strange storyline ingredients, leaving audiences with one disappointingly dull fantasy adventure. Read critic reviews
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WHERE TO WATCH
SEVENTH SON VIDEOS
SEVENTH SON PHOTOS
MOVIE INFO
CAST & CREW
Master Gregory
Mother Malkin
Tom Ward
Mam Ward
Alicia
Bony Lizzie
CRITIC REVIEWS FOR 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.
It’s too often a chore to make out Seventh’s beautiful countryside and cast members through the frequent eye rolls that some truly terrible dialogue and a limp love story induces.
It’s overly theatrical, like a stage production of a Shakespeare play, but that type of vivacious, physical acting doesn’t translate well to the screen. It feels distractingly amateurish, even making it difficult to focus on the story at all.
AUDIENCE REVIEWS FOR SEVENTH SON
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Dec 19, 2016Overall really lousy fantasy film with very little redeeming qualities. That’s pretty amazing, considering the amount of acting talent coming together here. The uninspired and unoriginal script and the mediocre special effects allow little room for fun to have. It’s not even particularly entertaining in a bad way. Just overall disappointing and lame. Only Bridges causes a few laughs.Jens SSUPER REVIEWER
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Jun 30, 2015The fantasy adventure Seventh Son is a poorly made film that’s rather silly and pointless. When a powerful witch breaks free of her prison a spook named Gregory recruits an apprentice to help him defeat her. Jeff Bridges, Ben Barnes, and Julianne Moore lead the cast, and their performances are awful (especially Bridges). The writing is also incredible bad; as the characters are one-dimensional and the plot is convoluted garbage. And, the creature effects aren’t that good either; lacking a sense of menace and terror. An underwhelming and generic fantasy tale, Seventh Son has little imagination and no passion.Dann MSUPER REVIEWER
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Jun 18, 2015Why can’t fantasy movies just be *good* any more? Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore forget that they are Academy calibre actors and fluff about for what feels like three hours (though in reality is barely more than half that) in a movie that may have been based on a semi-interesting idea somewhere down the line, about a blood moon or seven ago.Gimly MSUPER REVIEWER
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May 27, 2015This streak of not having seen any good movies since The Dead Zone is never going to end. Actually it’s only been close to 3 weeks since that. Last time this happened it was with Cars 2. I hated that movie so much, but after I reviewed that, there was period of about a month where I did not review a good movie. I’d have to go back to see how long it actually was, but let’s just say it was a month. It appears I’m being struck with that lack of luck in finding a good movie to review. Iron Monkey is the next review, so my luck will, hopefully, change tonight. But I digress, this film isn’t nearly as bad as the trailers made it out to be. I realize that’s not exactly high praise considering that the trailers made it look like the worst movie in about 5 years and I would still consider this bad. But there’s a point in the film where I realized that this was, really, more of a B-movie than something that was meant to compete with, say, The Hobbits of the world. It’s obviously not trying to compete with that. In fact, this is closer to 47 Ronin, the Keanu Reeves version, than it is to The Hobbit, LOTR, Harry Potter, etc. This is actually a slightly better movie than 47 Ronin which, despite having some B-movie charm, was an absolute disaster in terms of taking a concept and completely ruining it by throwing every wacky idea at the wall without much of a filter. I don’t think there’s any way that this film, in spite of how bad it is, actually reaches that level. There was even a point in the film where I thought I could actually have some fun watching this. Of course it was at the very beginning and before the film and its story started progressing, but the set-up was definitely there for it to be an unpretentious, silly film. There’s still some hints of that here, but I don’t think it ended providing enough genre fun to make it worth watching in a so bad it’s entertaining kind of way. That’s what I was referring to when I meant there could be some fun had with this, not that I actually thought it was going to be any good. Let’s just say it wasn’t quite as bad as 47 Ronin and it wasn’t quite as entertainingly bad as The Room was. It would fall somewhere along the middle of those two films. Which is weird considering that this is, slightly, superior to the two films I’ve just mentioned. It just wasted its chance to do something silly here. The cast is certainly good. Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges and Olivia Williams (in an abbreviated role) are always good. I don’t wanna say their performances were inspired, but I think that even these three knew the fate that would befall this movie. And, you know what, they still did about as much as they could with it. Ben Barnes is a little bit bland as a leading man and he lacks the charisma to truly carry a film on his own, but he’s a decent enough actor to hold his own. The story isn’t much to write home about and neither is the action, which is what this film, realistically, only had going for it if it wasn’t gonna be entertainingly awful. And I say that’s the only thing it had going for it because, really, who thought the story was gonna be anything worth talking about. Bridges’ character recruits a seventh son of a seventh son in order to fight witches. Turns out this seventh son is also half-witch so that makes him special, since he’s the only one with these attributes. And that’s another thing, Bridges’ character is part of an order that is all but extinct and yet Tom, Ben’s character, is supposed to keep it from dying? I’m sorry, but the film did a terrible job at portraying Tom’s progress as a witch hunter/killer/what have you. I don’t think he’s any better than when he started. He’s, for the most part, useless and he doesn’t do anything to make you believe he could hold his own against any witch of any worth his/her money. Yes, I know how the movie would like to portray him as he eventually did slay the main witch, in as anticlimactic a manner as possible to boot, but it felt more like a series of fortunate events as opposed to his progression from apprentice to badass witch hunter. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s how it felt. There are some cute lines from Bridges’ character, but not much comedy as one would hope. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it doesn’t have many jokes either. It’s honestly just a movie that comes and goes and doesn’t really make much of a mark one way or the other. It is a bad movie, but it’s not so bad that you’d find the experience memorable or funny. But it’s also not something that I would recommend to anybody, whatsoever. I don’t think it has anything that you really need to go out of your way to see. If a compilation of the best scenes in this film makes it way to YouTube, then I’d recommend that instead of spending 95+ minutes of your life on this. A few highlights do not make this worth recommending.Jesse OSUPER REVIEWER
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