94 min | PG | June 12, 2020 | Walt Disney Pictures
A twelve-year-old criminal mastermind discovers that fairies are real and kidnaps one to ransom his missing father. Kenneth Branagh adapts a beloved book series into a digital blur of exposition and weightless action. The film mistakes plot for story.
Artemis Fowl is a twelve-year-old genius and the son of a wealthy collector who has gone missing. Beneath Ireland lives a hidden civilization of fairies, dwarves, and goblins, and Artemis decides to exploit them to recover his father. The source material sells him as a criminal mastermind. Disney rebuilds him as a misunderstood boy and strips out the menace that made the character worth adapting. The film spends its energy explaining a world instead of dropping you inside one. Every scene arrives pre-digested by voiceover.
Ferdia Shaw plays Artemis with a flat affect that reads as boredom rather than calculation. He delivers grand schemes in the same tone he uses for small talk. Judi Dench plays Commander Root in a gravel-voiced growl behind heavy prosthetics, and she looks stranded by dialogue that gives her nothing to command. Josh Gad narrates the film as the dwarf Mulch Diggums and unhinges his jaw to tunnel through dirt, an effect the movie mistakes for a personality. Colin Farrell appears as the elder Artemis Fowl in fragments and vanishes for most of the film. Lara McDonnell brings more conviction to Captain Holly Short than the script around her earns.
Kenneth Branagh directs with a glossy surface and no spatial logic. The editing cuts between the fairy world and the Fowl estate so fast that the two never cohere into a single geography. The script by Hamish McColl and Conor McPherson compresses a dense novel into a flood of proper nouns and rules that nobody has time to absorb. A time-stopping siege of the Fowl mansion should anchor the movie, and instead the camera swirls through blue-tinted digital haze until the stakes dissolve. The production design renders the underground fairy world as a featureless wash of glass and light, beautiful and impossible to remember. Wonder gets announced rather than built.
Artemis Fowl wants to launch a saga and forgets to tell one coherent story first. It offers a hero with no inner life, a villain kept offscreen, and a mythology handed over like homework. The parts of a franchise are all present and none of them connect. Branagh gathers talented people and expensive effects around a script that never decides what the movie is about. A boy outsmarting a hidden world should feel like a power. Here it feels like a download.