It seems that reinvented and actionized fairy tales are all the rage these days. Take Snow White and the Huntsman and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. Jack and the Beanstalk gets with the times with an adventure movie of his own, and I enjoyed it.
In this version, there is of course Jack and the “magic beans” and a beanstalk, but they’ve added a princess who gets stuck way up in the beanstalk and needs to be rescued. Nothing like a dash of royalty and romance to make a story more interesting eh? What I liked about this “damsel in distress” though is that she is not completely helpless herself. She’s an adventurous girl who just had the bad luck to be sucked up by a beanstalk into a land where giants want to eat her. Obviously since Jack is the protagonist of this story, he has a thing for the princess and he volunteers to join the team sent to rescue her.
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| Jack and the princess |
I’m not gonna spoil the rest of the story, but there are lots of laugh-out-loud moments and the last 30 or so minutes of the movie had me literally biting my nails from the action. As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but think that this was the kind of movie I enjoyed watching as a child. You know, epic adventure fantasy stuff. Except that this film is rated PG-13 for all the violence, I suppose.
My only main issue was with the obviously CGI’d giants. They looked so fake next to the human characters that it was a bit off-putting.
Overall, I’d say that it’s not gonna make it to my list of favorite movies of all time, but it was a fun adventure. Worth a watch.
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