Folks, Disney’s $125 million adaptation of Artemis Fowl was finally dumped released on Disney+ this weekend after a year of delays and reshoots. The story of a boy genius searching for his missing father and nearly starting a race war with the magical world of faeries, the movie is the kind of expensive gibberish that sends studio executives flying out of their penthouse windows. (Luckily, Disney learned to put bouncy castles on the roofs of all of their valet stands after John Carter and The Lone Ranger.) It’s not just bad – it is astoundingly, fascinatingly awful, a film so broken on a fundamental level that it should be enshrined in a museum as an example of how not to spend $125 million.
I honestly can’t list all of the problems with Artemis Fowl, a movie seemingly written at gunpoint by an insane robot. If you taught an alligator English and shouted “do a Harry Potter” at it until it finished typing, you’d get a more coherent story than whatever I just spent 90 minutes watching. So rather than going through every single thing wrong with the movie, I’ve narrowed down the most egregious, stand-out moments of terribality.
The Film Is Narrated by a Character Who Doesn’t Witness Most of the Events
Easily the biggest piece of “we realized we didn’t have a movie and panicked into a bunch of reshoots” evidence on display in Artemis Fowl is the club-footed narration done by Josh Gad, who plays the mischievous dwarf Mulch Diggums. Mulch is a secondary character who doesn’t enter the main storyline until the third act, or roughly the last 30 minutes of the film, and yet somehow he is able to describe events he didn’t witness and could not possibly know anything about. Mulch is shoehorned into a hackneyed framing device involving him being detained and interrogated by the police, providing the excuse to have him continuously explain what we are seeing and regularly cut back to shots of him speaking directly to the camera. These shots are inexplicably in black-and-white. And there is so much narration; I’m not exaggerating when I say that you hear Mulch’s long-winded omniscience in virtually every scene, doing his absolute best to force the story into actually making sense. Also, there are several instances in which Gad noticeably runs out of breath, which is… bizarre. Did they only have time for one take? Was Gad late for another appointment? Anyway, the narration presents another glaring problem…
The Narrator Explains Character Motivations
When Paul Walker died in the middle of filming Furious 7, the cast and crew had to find ways to work around the fact that a good portion of his scenes as Brian O’Conner hadn’t been completed. In addition to using doubles (including Walker’s own brothers) and CGI, there are a handful of times in which other characters simply have to explain what Brian is thinking and feeling. It’s obvious and awkward, but completely forgivable considering the circumstances. Nobody died while making Artemis Fowl, and yet there are several moments in which Mulch Diggums pops in via voice-over to explain a character’s internal motivation. No joke, one scene begins with Dom Butler (Nonso Anozie) staring out over a cliff, and Mr. Diggums comes in to tell us “Dom knew he had to teach Artemis an important lesson, but he didn’t know how to do it. But then he realized his niece was the key.” And then the scene abruptly ends with a little girl whom we’ve never seen before fighting Dom with a kendo stick and then bringing Artemis a sandwich. Which brings me to the next major problem…
Characters Appear and Disappear, and Teleport Across the World
The little girl I just mentioned is Juliet (Tamara Smart), Dom’s niece and Artemis’ best friend, who was either added during reshoots or had substantial portions of her performance cut from the film. As I said, she suddenly appears midway through the movie, with her presence explained entirely by Mulch’s narration. Juliet then spends the rest of the movie randomly disappearing for major events and reappearing just as randomly. For instance, when the faeries lay siege to Fowl Manor, Dom and Artemis go outside to fight them with Juliet nowhere to be found. They don’t even mention her or where she might be. Then she randomly appears outside in a lighthouse a few scenes later, seemingly unaffected by the giant laser battle and surrounding magical army. Seriously, Juliet simply vanishes for long periods of time. Also, several characters teleport long distances, including Artemis himself. In one scene, he sends Dom to wait by a specific tree to see if any faeries show up. We see Artemis standing in his dad’s secret basement, wearing a suit and reading a journal. Then the very next scene, we cut to Dom spying on the tree, and Artemis is standing right next to him wearing a completely different outfit. This kind of shit happens more than once.
Artemis Never Leaves His House
With the exception of the film’s climax, in which he takes a helicopter to bust Mulch out of prison, Artemis (Ferdia Shaw) never leaves his house. The entire fantasy adventure takes place entirely within his gigantic cliffside mansion. The clues to his father’s disappearance? All inside the house. The magical MacGuffin that could end both the human world and the faerie world? Hidden inside the house. A giant battle with the faerie army that includes a time-stopping device and a rampaging troll? Inside that house, babaaaay! Rescuing his father and returning his faerie hostage to her home world? You better believe they just read a spell in his living room. I cannot stress this enough – 80% of the movie takes place in the same house, and after the first 10 minutes, the main character never leaves it.
Artemis’ Plan is Dumb and He Doesn’t Do Anything
Despite several characters regularly telling us that Artemis is the most brilliant human being to ever exist, his plan is such dumb luck goonery that I can’t believe he ever manages to tie his shoes correctly. After reading in his father’s journal that his father once encountered a faerie at a specific tree, Artemis uses his considerable brain to… just have his butler wait by the tree until maybe a faerie shows up. That’s it, that’s the plan. Holly Short (Lara McDonnell) just happens to show up after being sent to the surface to recapture a troll, so the only reason Artemis’ plan works at all is pure coincidence. He has no reason to believe that the tree is a faerie hotspot (it isn’t), and has only just discovered that faeries are real. Then he holds Holly hostage to get the faerie army to trade her for the macguffin, which is actually inside his house. They can’t storm in because of “faerie law”, a concept which is never explained, so instead they send a dwarf (Mulch) to tunnel his way inside and rescue Holly. Because of his natural affinity for treasure, Mulch discovers the MacGuffin immediately. Mulch’s narration consistently claims this is “all part of the plan”, but Artemis never explains any of it onscreen. (In fact, when Mulch tunnels into his house, Artemis is clearly surprised and asks Dom “What is that?”) Overlooking the fact that the supposed super genius couldn’t find the MacGuffin that was literally inside his own house the entire time, it’s the dumbest plan in history, and it hinged entirely on just waiting around a tree to see if a faerie showed up. At the end of the movie, Artemis smugly proclaims “I’m a criminal mastermind.” Son, you’ve committed exactly one felony which resulted in your entire house getting demolished by a troll. Let’s pump the brakes on “mastermind.” Also, the troll nearly crushes Artemis two different times because he’s just standing there staring at it like a jabroni. He literally runs directly underneath it just as it is about to fall and has to get shoved out of the way by Dom, who is then crushed to death in his place. But don’t worry – Holly resurrects him with faerie magic! Which sets up another one of my points!
The Magic Is Extremely Vague
At the very beginning of the film, Mulch assures us that we’re about to enter a world of magic. Then it immediately cuts to a montage of Artemis surfing, which not only has nothing to do with magic but also has nothing to do with the movie in general. (More on that in a bit.) But when we finally do see Haven City, the subterranean metropolis where all the magical beings live, it’s extremely unclear what is actually magic and what is just super-advanced technology. The faeries all fly, but their wings are mechanical and connected to a backpack. They have lasers and time-freezers and energy shields that are all based on devices. There’s a centaur, but he’s wearing a Bluetooth earpiece and using computers and flatscreens. Holly’s healing ability seems to be magic, but also seems to be connected to her suit somehow and is capable of being “jammed” by an outside device. The MacGuffin, a device called the Aculos, is described as being a weapon beyond comprehension, which is essentially the writers saying, “We couldn’t come up with anything interesting.” It also appears to be partially mechanical? At any rate, we’re never really told what it does apart from the super-vague “it’s the source of all magic.”
Artemis Makes No Sense as a Character
As I mentioned, we’re introduced to Artemis via a montage of him surfing. Normally, when you introduce a character in this way, it’s meant to tell the audience something about who he is – he’s athletic, or a free spirit, or something like that. Artemis is neither of those things. He’s a moody, smug nerd, and his athletic abilities never factor into the movie at all. It’s such a bizarre choice that kicks off a series of bizarre choices about Artemis in general, which all come together to illustrate the fact that Disney clearly didn’t know what they wanted this character to be. Is he a good guy? Is he a prick? Is he a “cool kid”? Is he Sherlock Holmes? He’s constantly doing contradictory things, such as making a huge condescending speech to Holly about how wearing sunglasses prevents faeries from controlling your mind, only to immediately remove the sunglasses and continue the conversation. The only consistent trait Artemis possesses is that he’s irritating, which isn’t a big win for a potential franchise-starter. (After detecting the phrases “franchise-starter” and “Artemis Fowl” in the same document, my word processor deleted itself.)
The MacGuffin is Dumb
To find his father, Artemis must find the Aculos, which we’re told is the source of all magic. (By the way, we’re told this in a throwaway line of dialogue 10 minutes from the end of the film.) We’re also told that the faeries have the same respect and regard for the Aculos as humans do for the sun. So… why the hell wasn’t it already locked up in a turbo vault in the center of faerie headquarters? We learn that Holly’s father stole it and gave it to Artemis Sr. to keep it safe, who just puts it in a wall safe like a fucking Rolex and then immediately gets kidnapped by a villain looking for the Aculos. In what universe is that “keeping it safe”? That’s like shooting the Pope out of a cannon to protect him from rabid bats – he was perfectly safe from bat attack in the Vatican and now you’ve shot him into the air, which is where bats live. The level of gymnastics the movie does to give us a reason for this magical device to be in Artemis’ house is worthy of an Olympic gold medal.
Dirt Rockets Out of Josh Gad’s Anus Like a Fire Hose
This is 100% a thing that happens and I don’t care to describe it further.