Metacritic reviews

The film is overstuffed, but it’s swift and unpretentious, barreling through a non-stop series of action setpieces without pausing too long to take a breath. The busyness doesn’t eradicate the clichés, much less enrich the film emotionally or thematically, but there’s no time to think about them when Bodrov and his screenwriters, Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight, are moving along to the next sensation. It’s transporting in that sense, and that sense alone.

Seventh Son is not a good movie, but it’s also not a pretentious one, and I call that a fair trade.

It’s a thoroughly incoherent, generally inane and surprisingly entertaining tale of witches and monsters and what legendary film critic Joe Bob Briggs calls “beast fu,” all set in a sub-Tolkien, sub-“Game of Thrones” pseudo-medieval universe.

(Bridges) has a tendency to make mistakes, especially when it comes to science fiction and fantasy titles. He has followed up the minor disasters that were "R.I.P.D." and "The Giver" with Seventh Son.

If anything, the movie offers up the guilty pleasure of seeing Bridges and Moore duel it out in front of countless green screens and a few stunning Canadian backdrops – two great actors clawing at each other with magic staffs and fake fire, trying to survive in the netherworld of heroic kitsch.

Director Sergei Bodrov’s movie is based on a kids’ book in which Tom was a 12-year-old, and the actors wisely pitch their performances to a young crowd.

The only question that’s worth considering in Seventh Son is whether this all-star B-movie is bad enough to cost Julianne Moore her “Still Alice” Oscar. And the answer to that is, “Not really.”

Moore goes into operatic mode as Mother Malkin, a nasty witch who morphs into a menacing winged dragon. The worst performance, however, belongs to Jeff Bridges as a marble-mouthed, curmudgeonly knight named Master Gregory.

Given the fine past work of its many parents, there was clearly potential here, but as delivered, Seventh Son amounts to nothing short of a creative miscarriage.

As is often the case in films like this, Seventh Son is at its weakest when it tries to leaven its brink-of-disaster gravity with a little nerdy humor.