He exchanges the horse with the beans just because he is promised that he will be paid by the monk’s colleagues for delivering these valuable beans to them, and Jack’s uncle is naturally not so pleased about this deal.
Of course, Jack coincidentally encounters a monk with those magical beans in the city. Now Jack lives alone with his grumpy uncle in their shabby house, and, because of their recent hard economic situation, they have to sell their horse, and it is Jack’s job to take the horse to the city and sell it at a reasonable price. Our young peasant hero Jack(Nicholas Hoult) was a big fan of this legend when he was young and his dear widower dad was alive to tell the story to his son every night. As shown in the prologue sequence told in a bedtime storytelling fashion, they once terrorized the land of the humans not only with their brutality and but also with their insatiable taste for human flesh, but they eventually retreated to their world after the humans found a way to have them under control.
Between the earth and the sky, there is a hidden place where the giants live, and these big creatures are not very nice dudes. Although this fantasy movie eventually switches its gear toward your average CGI action spectacle mode filled with lots of noises and bangs for its climactic finale, there is enough sense of fun and wonder in the movie for overlooking its weak points for a while, and the movie is more enjoyable than I expected in spite of my reservation generated after the end credits.Īs many of you know, the story is inspired by two fairy tales “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Jack the Giant Killer”. The results from this trend have been unsatisfying like “Mirror Mirror”(2012) and “Snow White and the Huntsman”(2012), or dreadful like “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters”(2013), or modestly good like “Alice in Wonderland”(2010), and, as far as I remember, most of them were not particularly memorable.Ī good news is that “Jack the Giant Slayer” will not waste your money if you just expect a simple fun peppered with some amusement. To be frank with you, I had no particular expectation on “Jack the Giant Slayer”, the latest offering from the recent trend of ‘re-interpreting’ fairy tales/folklores into Hollywood blockbuster films.