Menu

Jack the Giant Killer Has Beans, Knights, and Maybe Even a Giant


Perhaps it’s wrong to single out Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Killer for criticism. After all, several other upcoming films put dark spins on fairy tales, including Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Mirror Mirror, and Snow White and The Huntsman. So adapting the tale of Jack the Giant Killer, and borrowing a bit from Jack and the Beanstalk in the process, is entirely in line with Hollywood’s current notions of creativity.

That said, the latest trailer for Jack the Giant Killer looks like every other fantasy film slapped into production after The Lord of the Rings and those Narnia movies did well. It finds Nicholas Hoult (Beast in the Singer-produced X-Men: First Class) as the titular farmboy who looses a bunch of giants into the world, apparently by finding magic beans and failing to treat them like Gremlins. During the war that follows, there’s a princess to be saved and a two-headed giant ruler to be slain. As for the giants, you can catch a few glimpses of one or two in the trailer. I normally approve when trailers show very little (or nothing at all) of a film’s actual monsters,but when the rest of the movie looks as boilerplate as this, you may as well throw in the giants. Jack the Giant Killer‘s out in June, surely paving the way for gritty movie retellings of The Ugly Duckling and Rocky and Bullwinkle’s Fractured Fairly Tales.