The Last Witch Hunter

This is very much a Sword & Sorcery movie that bucks the standard by setting itself within the modern world, pushing the question of whether an S&S story has to be set in a fantasy world. I will maintain that this movie is set in a fantasy world, it’s just one that superficially resembles our own.

The movie opens in a poorly-defined “dark ages” which we can gather from later context is supposed to be sometime in the 1200s. Humanity is at war with an elder race called “Hexen” - which is a Germanic word for “witch”, though we are given zero indications where this all is supposed to be happening. Vin Diesel stars as Kaulder – which is not a real name, and the cognate “Calder” is a Scottish name. So this is just some vague “Europe in the dark ages”.

Anyway, we see the big showdown between Kaulder, his companions, and the Hexen, or witches they came to fight. The evil tree that serves as the lair of the Witch Queen looks amazing, and the digital painters do a great job with the backgrounds, giving it a really evocative look. The battle is a bit confusing, but in the end it seems like Kaulder is the sole survivor, who stabs the Witch Queen and she curses him with immortality as she dies. We later find that none of this is true, but that’s later.

Then the movie cuts to modern New York, where Kaulder has become a figure that would be very familiar to fans of the pulp heroes of the 30s. Vin always kind of plays the same character in his starring roles, but this time it works. Kaulder is like other pulp luminaries like Doc Savage or the Spider, as he is always the coolest, toughest, smartest guy in the room. He’s rich, lives in a cool apartment, and all the chicks want him.

Kaulder has spent 800 years as the “or else” of a human brotherhood that made a truce with the witches, and now, so long as they behave, he lets them go about their business. But of course there are always witches who say “fuck that” and start trouble, so Kaulder always has lots of opportunities to stab people with his flaming sword.

The look of the movie is pretty good, even if some of the CGI is iffy-looking. The sets they built and the locations used range from good to great, and the cinematography is excellent. The cast is solid, with Micheal Caine, Elijah Wood, and Rose Leslie on hand. Even if Caine is kind of phoning it in, he lends dignity to the proceedings, and Leslie is quite good as the gothy witch girl Chloe, who kind of becomes Kaulder’s sidekick.

The handling of magic in the plot is varied and imaginative, with witches using magic stones, runes, powders, herbs, incantations, and other methods that all look cool and have their own effects. It’s a bit too complex to work completely in a movie, when you don’t have time to really lay out the rules very well, but I appreciate that they did more than just have them throw CGI lights at one another, and the magic has some echoes of real-world witchcraft to give it texture. Magic is also depicted as being an inborn power, a connection to a vast and dangerous force that is inevitably dangerous to humans.

Overall, it’s a really fun ride of pure pulp entertainment. It’s doing what it wants to do, and nothing else, and so if you go in expecting something besides a pulpy adventure, you will probably be disappointed. If you are in the right mindset, however, you will have a good time. It wasn’t that well reviewed, and did rather poorly financially, which is a shame, as this kind of character always works best as a serial.

The Last Witch Hunter certainly fulfills some of the criteria of Sword & Sorcery. Kaulder is definitely in the mold of an S&S hero, and he is not a black and white, moral character. He’s driven by revenge for his slain family, but also has an ambiguous relationship with both his ostensible foes and the people he serves. Magic is shown as dangerous and unknowable – an inhuman power that only witches can use. The theme of man fighting for survival against a prehuman race is very much in the tradition of Howard and Moorcock, and the idea of a secret war carried on against a hidden enemy for centuries has echoes of “The Shadow Kingdom” and similar pulp tales.

The world-spanning stakes and modern setting are the elements least compatible with S&S, and there could definitely be more straight-up violence in the movie, but overall, this is a film that Sword & Sorcery fans should find a lot of good stuff in, and I have hopes it will find a niche as a cult classic down the line.