To be blunt, “Artemis Fowl” is, well … foul 2/5
if you read the books which were fun young adult fare you will be amazed at what they did to the plot to avoid the appearance of young Fowl as a heartless sociopath. In the books he starts his hero’s journey as a rather despicable person but grows slowly through the course of many books. In the deleted scenes which Disney is providing, we can see a very different film was at one point considered as the torture of an alcoholic fairy was filmed and actually handled rather well by all concerned... I expect some Disney executives about lost their lunch when they saw that as a part of the first few min of the film.
details here
https://screenrant.com/artemis-fowl...FgpW1fLkiZhD5nHEE7xOnnKWVXcqV-p61KsW_2KUE9fW8
but the other casting decisions such as Judy Dench as the commander of the fairy police changes the whol dynamic of the first half of the book as there is a whole glass ceiling thing with Officer Holy Short is the first mid level officer in the force and the commander a basic misogynistic type.... but she is not the worst miscasting for that we have Josh Gad..... playing a "giant dwarf" With some odd voice choice and a bit of rather disgusting CGI...
I can’t be totally hard on this film as the author of the books seems to have given his blessing to the plot mangling and the production design is of a high standard.
I don’t think, given the decisions about the character arc of Foul, And the basic plot changes to a far far weaker plot than that of the books the film could have been saved and given its 95 min run time what they ended up with is incoherent at best as so much was cut from needed exposition.
A few other high points... the young actor Playing Foul does ok in his first film and better than ok in some of the deleted clips. The actor playing the centaur Foley. Has fun with his very limited screen time. The Actress playing Holly Short does fine.
this film could be seen as a cautionary tale why complex fantasy should not be crammed into a 95 run time but run over several seasons with about 2 volumes used for each season of 10 to13 50 min shows.... the Game of Thrones treatment.
But it would also need to be produced by a company that accepted that the hero would start the first season as a sociopath.
