Jack the Giant Slayer is a 2013 fantasy adventure directed by Bryan Singer, written by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney, and adapted from the British fairy tales Jack the Giant Killer and Jack and the Beanstalk. It runs 114 minutes and stars Nicholas Hoult as Jack, Eleanor Tomlinson as Princess Isabelle, Stanley Tucci as Lord Roderick, with Ian McShane, Bill Nighy and Ewan McGregor. It cost at least $195 million, took $197.7 million worldwide, and is routinely listed among the fifteen biggest money losers in cinema history.

Before anything else, I need to note that two weeks ago I reviewed a different film entirely and my principal complaint was that it did not contain enough Stanley Tucci. I am now writing the same sentence again. At this point I am no longer convinced this is a criticism of individual films so much as a systemic failure across the industry.

There are moments in this I genuinely enjoyed, and almost all of them are visual. Specifically, the giants. The sense of scale is well handled, the weight of them is convincing, and the way they interact with the environment around them is consistently the most interesting thing happening. And, I will be honest, the sequences where they are simply crushing people are excellent. Critics at the time arrived at much the same conclusion, with one review describing the giants as the genuine stars of the film, a collection of enormous hairy burping beasts whose home resembles an oversized fraternity house. That is accurate and it is also the film at its most entertaining.

Nicholas Hoult is fine. Entirely fine. He is a likeable and capable lead and he does precisely what is asked of him without ever being given anything interesting to do.

The rest of the cast were there. Present and accounted for. Ian McShane and Ewan McGregor both appear in this film and I would struggle to tell you a single memorable thing either of them does. Stanley Tucci receives nowhere near enough screen time, which upset me, as previously established.

My genuine problem, though, is structural. There is simply not enough film here to justify the length. It runs a hundred and fourteen minutes and does not contain a hundred and fourteen minutes of story. There are long passages where very little of consequence occurs, the plot is thin, and you can feel it being stretched.

And there is an explanation for that, which turns out to be the most interesting thing about the entire production.