Jack the Giant Slayer Reviews
Top CriticA mash-up of old-school heroism, pantomime villainy, starstruck lovers and post-'Shrek' archness, it's more exhausting than exhilarating.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
It's fast, rousing, and blessedly brief - under two hours instead of, say, nine in three bladder-straining installments.
Not awful, not wonderful, Jack the Giant Slayer is a midrange fairy tale epic that's a lot more ho-hum than fee-fi-fo-fum.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Jack the Giant Slayer is slight, but consistently amusing.
The movie feels so much like a video game that your fingers instinctively itch to do something, though a Jack video game isn't one we'd really want to play.
The script sets up the situation and characters nicely, and the actors are terrific.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Although it often feels there's more of mechanics than the muse keeping Jack the Giant Slayer going, this sprightly fairy tale reworking is full of beans, smartly written and packs plenty of fun.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
While it's fine for a director to explore his childhood inspirations, you hope he would bring something a bit more personal to it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"Jack the Giant Slayer" seems more likely to be "Jack the Giant Bomb."
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
"Jack" seems designed to appeal to a very narrow, and possibly illusory, demographic: the mature moppet.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's fast paced, energetic, and enormously likeable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Singer's take on ye olde yarne has wit about it, and it certainly looks good.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
There may never have been a Jack tale that delivered so little pleasure for so many dollars as what we have here.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
What's the point of making a movie with a 9-year-old boy's sensibility, then including just enough violence to garner a PG-13 rating?
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Jack's problem is that he's a commoner, but the movie's problem is that its script is commoner still, an enchantment-free pretext for animated action, straight-ahead storytelling and ersatz romance.
"Jack the Giant Slayer" is the kind of old-fashioned, entertaining fantasy-adventure you once saw regularly in theaters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There's more to this Jack and the Beanstalk adaptation than Fee-fi-fo-fum.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It feels like a film made by a committee, for a demographic rather than an audience. It's a tale full of sound and fury (and flying bodies) signifying nothing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
This finally is just a digitally souped-up, one-dimensional take on "Jack and the Beanstalk," capped by the kind of interminable blowout that makes many big-studio entertainments feel as long as the last Oscars.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
At its heart, the film is just a simple fairy tale, an epic reduced to an engaging adventure of a bedtime story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
This digitally tricked-out fairy tale makes for a reasonably engaging kids' fantasy, but at best we're talking about a junior varsity "Lord of the Rings."
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
This grotesque world is imaginatively, magically rendered with heavy stone architecture and a dreary lack of adornment. It's such an intriguing place that you wouldn't mind staying a bit longer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Big and loud and so bland it kinda feels like we've been sold a bill of goods.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Jack the Giant Slayer proves the axiom "If you can't make it good, make it 3D."
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The director, Bryan Singer, works more anonymously here than he did in the X-Men films. Jack the Giant Slayer feels like it could have been made by anyone.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
If you thought the tale ended when Jack clambered back down from the skies, then you haven't given it as much thought as Singer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's stuck in a big-budget-movie middle ground - not quite thrilling enough to be an action movie, not quite funny enough for a comedy - and, once you've pondered the impressive size of the beanstalk, there's not much else there.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
By the time the giants have descended the beanstalk and laid siege to the king's castle, and the boiling oil comes out with the flaming arrows and the flying flaming trees, it's like: Enough already.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The action is a little too intense for very young children. But for everyone else, including cynical grown-up critics who didn't think they'd ever give a Fee, a Fi, a Fo or a Fum about this movie, it's a terrific adventure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
[M]ay get you habitually reaching for your PS3 controller to jab the cut-scene skipping "X" button
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
The film is like a big Disneyland ride, full of wonder and myth.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
''Jack the Giant Slayer'' ends up being smart, thrilling and a whole lot of fun.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Fee-fi-fo-fum, this fairy-tale retread is pretty dumb.
Simply in terms of efficient storytelling, clear logistics and consistent viewer engagement, Jack is markedly superior to the recent "Hobbit."
Singer evokes another era of fantasy filmmaking when the illusions before our eyes were created in an artist's studio rather than a computer lab. It's more Jason and the Argonauts than Shia and the Transformers.
