The Last Witch Hunter

What an ugly, idiotic mess this is. Like a sausage-faced, gender-flipped Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vin Diesel plays Kaulder, a man on an epic quest to battle the dark forces of magical femininity under the watchful eye of his fusty British handler Dolan (Michael Caine). But when Dolan is attacked by an ancient evil, Kaulder teams up with good witch Chloe (Rose Leslie) to prevent the magical apocalypse.

Give ‘The Last Witch Hunter’ some credit, though: unlike, say, ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’, it does go some way towards muting the inherent misogyny in the concept, largely by making a couple of the witches dudes. Also, there are two fun minutes near the beginning, when ‘This Is England’ legend Joe Gilgun turns up as a snarling, tattooed Irish nutter.

Otherwise this is a relentlessly unengaging affair, its derivative and logic-deficient script matched by flat direction and fussy, unconvincing CGI. The performances are particularly rotten: we expect Vin to wobble about like a half-inflated penis balloon with a face scrawled on it, but Caine and Elijah Wood (playing his fellow priest) should know better; and the cut-glass-posh Leslie is simply unbearable – picture Princess Beatrice on a gap year working in a Manhattan goth bar. A hideous electro mangling of the Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ over the closing credits adds insult to injury. But hey, at least that means it’s over.