The Final Cut

The Wedding Ringer **

Dir:Jeremy Garelick

Starring: Kevin Hart, Josh Gad, Kelly Cuoco-Sweeting, Ken Howard, Mimi Rogers, ClorisLeachman

Jimmy Callahan (Kevin Hart) has a good business model going. For a neat little sum of money he becomes the best man at the weddings of hapless losers who have no friends of their own. His latest client is nerdy but rich tax attorney, Doug (Josh Gad), who is about to get married to the gorgeous and way-out-of-his-league Gretchen Palmer (Kaley Cuco-Sweeting from The Big Bang Theory). Doug is so bereft of friends that not only does he not have a best man but he doesn’t have a single groomsman either. So Jimmy has an almost impossible task in front of him and a very short space of time in which he has to pull off a miracle.

If you leave all logic at the door then you can have a few good laughs (the better stuff is stacked up front) and Hart and Gad have reasonably good chemistry. But the movie gets increasingly bogged down by an uninspired script and scenes which have no real bearing on the proceedings – such as an interminable and decidedly not funny touch football game with Doug and his "pals" on one side and his future father-in-law’s friends led by Joe Namath on the other.

Cut to chase: Only for a very, very slow afternoon.

Seventh Son **

Dir:Sergei Bodrov

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Ben Barnes, Kit Harrington, Alicia Vikander, Olivia Williams

For those still suffering Harry Potter withdrawal symptoms you could do worse than read The Wardstone Chronicles (or The Spook’s Apprentice) series by Joseph Delaney. In thirteen books, Delaney chronicles the adventures of Tom Ward, the seventh son of a seventh son, who is apprenticed to John Gregory, a Spook. Spooks spend their lives battling supernatural evil creatures such as witches, boggarts, ghosts, and ghasts and, like the Potter series, Tom Ward’s adventures also get progressively darker and certainly provide some spine-chilling moments. There’s plenty of good stuff in the books to provide fodder for a successful movie franchise.

But fans of the books (count me in as one) will end up disappointed with the Seventh Son. The movie starts off promisingly enough but then rather than trust the source material and adapting just one (or perhaps two) of the books it tries to squeeze in too much (some of it borrowed from the books and some of it invented for the screen) into one movie. The result is that most of the character development either gets sacrificed (at the altar of so-called action) or is too rushed to be believable. What we are left with is a mish-mash of medieval fantasy tropes, adequate but uninspiring special effects and cut-rate characterisation wrapped up in a screenplay which doesn’t allow itself enough room to breathe. The cast tries to do what it can (though Jeff Bridges’ choice of accent for John Gregory is a very odd one, serving more to distract than enhance) but doesn’t really have much to work with. Julianne Moore is the wicked witch Malkin and Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian from the Narnia movies) is Tom Ward.

Cut to chase: Disappointing adaptation of a popular book series.