‘Artemis Fowl’ is a criminal waste of time: Disney Plus Review

In a summer without blockbuster films, you may be tempted to check out Artemis Fowl.

It looks like the kind of splashy escapism you’d have caught in a theater in a more normal year — in fact, it was supposed to be that, until the pandemic forced Disney to move it to Disney+. It’s based on a series of books that people seem to like. It stars fine actors like Judi Dench and Colin Farrell, and was directed by the perfectly respectable Kenneth Branagh. All signs point to a nice night in.

But as Artemis Fowl himself comes to realize, not everything is as it seems. This movie has a dark secret. And that is that it’s freaking terrible.

Artemis Fowl does at least do potential viewers the kindness of tipping its hand early. The first hints of trouble arrive right away, as a dirtied-up Josh Gad starts spouting inane exposition about “the infinite possibilities of magic.” Another indication comes right after that, in the form of an extremely phony-looking shot of Artemis surfing. The surfing is never mentioned again.

At this point, roughly five minutes into the film, you may realize you’ve made a mistake. Lean into that instinct.

Were you hoping Artemis would at least be a likable hero? He is, alas, a condescending little shit who informs his teacher that Albert Einstein is the only person he will deign to treat as an intellectual equal. In Artemis’ defense, the teacher was reciting Artemis’ own backstory to him for no reason, which would make anyone cranky. Unfortunately for Artemis (Ferdia Shaw), his is a world in which every conversation starts with “As you know…” or “Need I remind you…”

At this point, roughly five minutes into the film, you may realize you’ve made a mistake. Lean into that instinct. Feel absolutely free to turn this movie off. It never happened.

But if you choose to power through, you will discover along with Artemis Fowl that he lives in a universe where fairies are 1) real and 2) kinda pissed off, having been driven underground a thousand years ago by greedy humans. One of the fairies has apparently kidnapped Artemis’ dad, also named Artemis Fowl (Farrell), and the ransom is a MacGuffin called, always in hushed, reverent tones, The Aculos. 

You will learn that Gad is playing a giant dwarf — so, an average-sized human — named Mulch Diggums, who can tunnel through earth at high speeds by eating giant gulping mouthfuls of dirt and shooting it out of his ass. You will not learn why he is talking in that weird gravely voice, but you will start to strongly suspect that the reason he’s doing so much talking is because someone decided in post-production to turn the movie they already shot into a totally different movie, and they needed someone to do the heavy lifting of reading all the exposition that was left on the cutting room floor. 

Diggums will talk ’til he’s blue in the face, and it will not make a difference. Artemis Fowl is a 95-minute movie that takes at least two hours to watch properly, because trying to make even basic sense of the plot means skipping back several times to see if you missed an important plot point while your attention was drifting off. You didn’t. It was just never explained. 

Or maybe it was explained, several times even, but it came out as such incoherent hogwash that you couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Such is the case with the concept of “time freeze,” a fairy trick deployed twice in the movie to two radically different effects. The second time, it doesn’t seem to have any discernible impact, but all the characters shout about it extra loud so you’ll think it’s important. 

By the third act, you might wonder whether the character who declares that “the rules are clear” is just saying that to fuck with you. Or what possessed Dench and Farrell to sign up for this movie. How it is possible for a movie to look both way too expensive and way too cheap at the same time. How bad was Artemis Fowl before someone made the decision to hack it to death in editing? Mediocre at best, surely — but could it really have been worse than what it ended up being?

Probably, though, the question that will come up most is how much of the movie is left, and the answer will always be more than you think. When you finally do reach the end, you’ll realize that everything you just saw was to set you up for a sequel. A sequel! As if anyone could want a thing after what you just went through. 

And, look, if this is the journey you want to go on, I can’t stop you. It’s your life, and your Disney+ subscription. Both of us have better things to do than argue with what I think you should do with it.

But if you’re merely considering the option, if you’re wondering how awful it could really be, if it might into the category of so-bad-it’s-good, if it might still pass muster with less discerning members of you’re household, I’m here to warn you. Take it from me, a person who’s watched Artemis Fowl: Artemis Fowl is a criminal waste of time.

Artemis Fowl is now streaming on Disney+.