I mentioned the other week when I reviewed Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas that I usually don’t review fantasy movies. Generally, I like to focus on films that deal with the consequences of technology, such as last week’s Demolition Man.

As I had a free Redbox movie rental available to me, I decided to give Jack the Giant Slayer a chance. I had been wanting to see it since its release, but I heard that the movie was a box-office flop. The film cost about $300 million to make and market, and it didn’t get back half of this budget.

I have seen high priced films that bombed, and it is never pretty. I talked about how Speed Racer was a box office bomb, but I actually thought it was pretty good and was one of my favorite films of that year. Jack the Giant Slayer isn’t as bad as Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen, but my nine-year-old son liked it.

Jack the Giant Slayer is a film that is pretty ambitious, but it is sadly unoriginal. I suppose that the source material would be Jack and the Beanstalk, but Jack and the Giant Slayer is a completely different take on the classic story.

Jack and the Giant Slayer has an introduction with about as much exposition as a Peter Jackson Tolkien film. We see young Jack listen to a bedtime story about how giants from kingdom in the air invaded the country. This scene is spliced with a young princess listening to the same story. For some odd reason, the two kids imagine the exposition as wooden-style CG, and it reminds me of the opening of Hellboy 2. The only way to stop the giants was to melt one of its hearts down into a crown, which then gives the user the power to control them.

Okay, I will have to say that this crown is one of the banes of this film. I honestly don’t know who would think of melting a giant’s heart and making it into a crown would do anything. Worse yet, it introduces an element of mind control into the film that it didn’t really need. It does make for some interesting plot twists that I will not spoil.

Anyway, Jack sells some livestock for some magic beans. This time, it is a horse, and not a cow. The reason why the man is willing to trade beans for a horse is because this man stole these magic beans from the castle and needs a horse for a quick getaway. He tells Jack to take the beans to a certain monastery and Jack will be rewarded. So it kind of makes sense that Jack makes the trade he does, and not idiotic like fairy tale Jack.

Like the main character in Gremlins, Jack is told not to get his magical gift wet. Of course, these beans get wet and take Jack’s house with a princess inside to the giant’s overhead kingdom.

Wait, how did the princess get to Jack’s house? Well, as it turns out, she is a princess who constantly runs away from the caste because she doesn’t want to be a princess. They must have got this princess on loan from Disney.

It takes a while for the action to begin in this film. This is no surprise from director Bryan Singer, who gave us X-men and Superman Returns. I found the slow pace worked for X-men, but not so well for Superman Returns, as it took quite a while before Superman catches a jet plane, and the film goes downhill from there. Singer also gave us Valkyrie, a film about a botched assassination of Adolf Hitler which was planning, planning, and more planning. Jack and the Giant Slayer has a pace that is a little too slow, but really kicks into high gear when the main characters enter the giant kingdom.

The giants in this film could have been interesting characters, but they end up being rather motiveless villains. They want to invade the Earth, but there doesn’t seem to be a reason for them to attack other than an easy food supply.

That’s right, these giants eat people, and you don’t really ever see it too graphically as this is PG-13. This could have also been one of the downfalls of this film. I heard that Bryan Singer wanted to make a darker fairy tale and target this film for adults. Then the studio looked at it, and thought it would work better as a family film. As I mentioned before, it was a film that my nine-year-old son enjoyed, and the villain has a very violent comeuppance that didn’t scare him at all. Honestly, I think it is the best scene in the film.

In short, Jack the Giant Slayer is a cautionary tale about what happens when you adapt a fairy tale in a post Peter Jackson world. Jackson proved that you can really make a convincing fantasy film, but it has to be written just right. Jack doesn’t really have any deep characters, but it is high on imagination. For that, I will give it a thumbs up.