106 min | PG | July 21, 2021 | Netflix
Jim Lake Jr. has battled trolls, aliens, and wizards across three series. Now Arcadia faces the apocalypse, and every hero del Toro built gets one last stand. The titans are enormous, and the goodbye is rushed.
Jim Lake Jr. is a teenager from Arcadia who found a magical amulet and became the Trollhunter. Three animated series build his world out of trolls, alien royalty, and feuding wizards. Rise of the Titans collapses all of it into a single feature and asks every character to share one screen. The Arcane Order wants to reset the world, and the only thing standing between Earth and three rising titans is a high schooler and his friends. The film is less a story than a reunion. It wants to honor everyone at once, and that ambition becomes both its engine and its weakness.
Emile Hirsch plays Jim with a weariness that fits a hero who has carried too much for too long. He sounds like a kid who would rather be ordinary and knows that option is gone. Kelsey Grammer gives Blinky his rolling theatrical gravity, and the troll mentor steadies the chaos around him. Steven Yeun turns Steve Palchuk into a loud, insecure comic engine, and Charlie Saxton keeps Toby grounded as the human heart of the group. Lexi Medrano plays Claire with a calm that the plot keeps stress-testing. Alfred Molina lends Archie a clipped, dry wit as the shape-shifting familiar, and Nick Frost plays Stuart for nervous comic energy.
Johane Matte, Andrew L. Schmidt, and Francisco Ruiz Velasco direct, and the script comes from Marc Guggenheim, Dan Hageman, Kevin Hageman, and Guillermo del Toro. The animation scales up for the feature. The titans tower over Arcadia, and the camera tilts to make them read as geography rather than monsters. The action staging favors wide shots that let the giants move with weight. The color work brightens for the franchise’s signature magic, with the amulet glow and Claire’s shadow portals cutting through the dark. The trouble is structural, and four writers compress years of plot into a single arc that sprints to fit every character and callback into the frame.
Rise of the Titans works best as a farewell. It rewards viewers who have spent three series with these characters and gives most of them a final moment. The scale is real, and the emotional stakes land when the film slows down enough to feel them. The ending swings for something bold and refuses the comfortable resolution the genre expects. As a standalone story it is overstuffed and rushed. As the last chapter of a long one it delivers the goodbye it promises.