This Europudding production plods unrewardingly through the murky and humourless terrain of science-fantasy; it is a movie of flabby characterisation, dull storytelling and midprice VFX work. German screenwriter Constantine Werner has adapted a story from fantasy author George RR Martin and the resulting dialogue lands like a series of sandbags on a concrete floor; director Paul WS Anderson handles the material with stolid determination.
The setting is some postapocalyptic futureworld where humanity’s remnants gather in an urban hellhole, while outside in the “lost lands” chaos reigns. Anderson’s partner Milla Jovovich bring a persistent blandness to the part of Gray Alys, a witch who, by defying the theocratic tyranny, has come to symbolise a growing resistance; she is being menaced by hatchet-faced, crop-haired witchfinder Ash (Arly Jover).
It is Alys’s vocational custom never to refuse a request accompanied by payment, and so when haughty young princess Melange (Amara Okereke) asks her for the power to shapeshift, Alys agrees, knowing that there is a shapeshifter in the “lost lands” whose powers she can steal. But Melange’s courtier-slash-lover Jerais (Simon Lööf) approaches her secretly and begs her not to confer this dangerous skill on Melange – and Alys accepts that request as well, though the question of how she is to reconcile these opposing missions does not lead to any very interesting tension. To guide her through the lost lands, Alys befriends a tough hunter called Boyce (Dave Bautista), and Bautista does at least give us a kind of quizzical bemusement in the role, which is no more or less preposterous than anything else.
As they battle their way through the hostile landscape, Alys and Boyce become close, though one is keeping secrets from the other. The film’s pure pointlessness reaches its climax with a non-epic moment in which a train plunges off the edge of a cliff, and the audience is apparently being asked to gasp at how spectacular that is – a tough ask, given that it is, of course, effectively happening on a laptop.
• In the Lost Lands is in UK and Irish cinemas from 14 March.
