He knows nothing, Vin Diesel. Together with lovely Rose Leslie, he saves the world from the bad witches, alone, and still ignorant of the machinations around him. In the end the obvious thing at the beginning of the movie becomes the secret that threatens the world once again.
The film is reasonably acted (Vin Diesel is perfect until he tries to smile) and the script is a typical adventure fiction story. In the end you get exactly what you expected, no more, no less. However, a storm of bad publicity that rose out of nothing (magic perhaps? Who put those runes together like that?) made everyone bad mouth it like little parrots.
Is this is a good movie? Not really. Is it a blockbuster movie that can entertain. Yes!
The thing that one must realize is that even if someone would have wanted to make the effort to make the film better, for art's sake, no matter they would have gotten the same amount of money in the end, there wasn't much they could have done. It's a one hour and a half story in which Vin Diesel destroys witches. What else can you cram in there? Opera? Character development before he kills everybody?
They could have gone with more realistic and complex fight scenes, more horror, make it R rated, perhaps. That alone would have easily turned it into a pretty cool movie, but then mothers wouldn't have let their preciouses go to the theaters, those that would chose to even distribute it.
Bottom line: just go, turn your brain off and enjoy. At least they didn't murder another book series, like they did with Seventh Son, where they had all the story and characters and fan base from the books and still they messed it up somehow.
