You Just Scream With Boredom

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The film begins with a media frenzy taking place outside of a building called Fowl Manor. Having never read the books I had no clue what the film Artemis Fowl was going to be about and so just assumed that Fowl Manor was a place where rich people might go to wear strange masks and have sex with each other. It's not. It's where the Fowl family reside apparently. Although Fowl Manor does also sound like it could be an old fashioned euphemism that my Nan might use for the bathroom after she's visited it for a shit. I suppose all of the above could still technically be true to be fair. The film never explicitly mentions that rich people use the place to spaff all over each other but that doesn't mean that they don't and I never really visit my Nan enough to know what she might call the bathroom. I think you have to agree that would be a pretty bold opening for a Disney film though, wouldn't it?! Children sit around excited to see their favourite book adapted to the big screen only for it to open with a gang of rich toffs all fucking each other whilst dressed in dog suits as one confused old lady wanders about having shat all up the bathroom. It wouldn't make any end-of-the-year best lists but you know... I'd watch it. 

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Sadly it seems that the crowd is actually outside this Manor to witness the arrest of a man that looks so like Hagrid from the Harry Potter series that you'd think the filmmakers were trying to get themselves fucking sued. Knowing how much JK Rowling hates it when trans women claim to be women, I can't help but wonder how she would have felt when she saw this guy appropriating the look of one of her own characters. I didn't catch the full title of this movie but if it wasn't Artemis Fowl and the Boiling Mug of TERF Piss then I think they missed a trick. This Hagrid-esque character is actually called Mulch Diggums and despite being pretty regular sized by human standards he claims to be a dwarf. He's just an especially tall dwarf apparently. I know I've said this before but I still don't understand how fantasy films can get away with classing dwarves as a different species to other regular humans. Dwarves are a real thing in our world. They're people with a disability and yet apparently it's fine to constantly depict them as being an angry cave-dwelling sub-species. Pick any other disability and do that and see how far you get with it. “I welcome you all to this secret fantasy council whether you be from the world of men, elves, or autistics”. Good luck with that. If this motherfucker can claim he's a dwarf that's tall then the next time I go to the supermarket I'm claiming to be a cripple that can walk and I'm parking right at the fucking front. 

From here, we find this character as he essentially narrates this story during a police interview which works as not only a framing device, but a convenient way of spoon-feeding exposition so forcefully that you'd think your brain was on fucking hunger-strike. “At this point, Artemis began to wank”, Mulch's voice-over will inform us. “I'm having a wank”, Artemis will then say to his butler. “A wank?”, his butler will repeat to which Artemis will respond, “yes, a wank, and a very big one at that”. We'll then go back to Mulch's voice-over which will then confirm for one final time, “So yes, Artemis was having a big wank”. Not that Artemis did have a wank in this movie of course. That's just an example of how clunky and bluntly they explain everything that happens in the movie, although I do suspect that Artemis Fowl probably does spend a good amount of his time having a wank. He's a twelve-year-old boy and if my childhood is anything to go by I think I nearly fucking died from starvation at his age having just discovered masturbation that year. Again this isn't dealt with in the movie itself, although when I look at Artemis Fowl I see the face of a wanker. At one point Artemis Fowl walks towards the camera in slow-motion whilst dressed in an expensive suit. I think it's meant to seem cool, but because of Artemis's smug little prick of a face and his over-all sense of entitlement he just looks like the kind of kid that will one day grow up to get away with a rape. 

The plot begins to kick in when Artemis's Dad disappears having been accused of the theft of some priceless artefacts. We're told that he's been kidnapped, although if I was Artemis's father then I think I would have just fucked off like this and made up some bullshit excuse to not see the kid too. We're told that Artemis is super-intelligent and often sticks out in school having once even managed to clone a goat. Although I don't know why he would want to clone a goat? If he's as smart as he claims then I reckon he's likely heard the rumours about how goats and sheep contain the most anatomically similar vagina to a human. In which case I'm guessing that the bit of him that does stick out in school is his horny little goat-fucking child's dick. His father is played by Collin Farrell and I can honestly say that I have never seen him look so bored whilst delivering a performance, and I saw him in fucking S.W.A.T. I had to rewatch a few scenes with him in case he was blinking 'help me' in morse code and this was itself an actual fucking hostage video. But at the same time, Artemis Fowl is a really boring fucking film. Judi Dench plays the Irish leader of an underground army of militant leprechauns in an act of cultural insensitivity that I think might restart the fucking Troubles. These leprechauns use a device called a 'Time Stop' though, and as this ninety-minute film dragged on I began to suspect I might have fallen victim to it my fucking self. 

The film itself was directed by Kenneth Branagh and so it's no surprise that a man that many will know best as being Gilderoy Lockhart will have stolen a lot of his best ideas from Harry Potter. Artemis Fowl might have been positioned as Disney's new franchise but at the end of the day, it's just another Percy Jackson-esque sub-Potter knock-off. Even the films' effects appear to have come from The Philosopher's Stone era of big rubbery looking CG monsters. There's a troll that turns up in this movie that looks so fake that even the flat-Earth society would claim it to be a load of bullshit, and those daft twats will believe anything. I have no idea if fans of the book will enjoy this movie having never knowingly met any, although I've just messaged my friend Kris who I thought might be a fan of it and he said that “it was a fucking amazing film”. Although I have seen him spell his own name wrong on two separate occasions and so make of that what you will. Of course, this film was originally meant for a big-screen debut but with the onset of the Coronapocolypse, it was deemed a more viable decision to have its premiere on a streaming service instead. In which case you might argue that Artemis Fowl represents one glimmer of positivity in the cesspit year of shite that is 2020 in that at least the pandemic prevented us from having to leave our house and pay to fucking see it. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.