Director: Manuel Sicillia
Starring: Freddie Highmore, Saorise Ronan, David Walliams, Mark Strong, Alfred Molina, Rupert Everett, Antonio Banderas
Running Time: 96 Mins
Certificate: PG
Synopsis: In a land where Knights are outlawed, a young boy named Justin attempts to follow in his brave grandfather’s footsteps and become a Knight.
Antonio Banderas, fresh from providing his sexy Spanish tones for four SHREK films, has clearly decided that providing the voice of a cat in some near decent animated movies has given him all the knowledge he needs to produce similar animated box office gold. Someone however should really have told him the golden rule of such a plan – don’t make a terrible movie!
The result of Banderas’ endeavour is JUSTIN AND THE KNIGHTS OF VALOUR, a ninety-minute monstrosity that shamelessly filches entire plotlines, gags and visual ideas from much better animated movies like HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON and SHREK 2. Wheeling out recycled gag after recycled gag for near enough its entire running time, JUSTIN starts low and the only way from there is down. Medieval fast food chains? Seen it! Dated references to HIGHLANDER and THE MATRIX? Yawn! Rupert Everett as an effeminate bad guy? Oh dear lord, have we actually time travelled back to 2004?!!
The animation is equally below par. CBEEBIES craps out more convincing and visually arresting animation then that of JUSTIN in its sleep. Action sequences are slow, stilted and clumsy, the more intimate character moments even more so. The final battle during the film’s anti-climatic climax is a perfect of example of this, the fight scenes awkwardly choreographed and lacking in pace and flair.
Looking up the list of stars in the cast on IMDB, its clear where the film’s budget was mostly spent. Watching the finished product though, its painfully clear that the filmmakers are well within their rights to demand their money back, as the voice performances here are so phoned in that BT or O2 should really start charging for them by the second. Freddie Highmore as Justin is easily the worst culprit, clearly reading the script for the first (and probably only) time, delivering his lines with all the verve and vigour of a highly medicated Sloth!
But ultimately it’s the lacklustre script that’s the main issue here. Fair enough if your actors are hacking it up like there’s no tomorrow, but if your dialogue is as awkward, overdone, unfunny, and uninspiring as the dialogue the characters spout out here, then its no surprise the performances are so bad. The amount of verbal info dumping throughout is astoundingly awful, to the point that even two-thirds into the movie, we’re still getting backstory and set-up that could easily have been cut altogether! If any children in the audience haven’t fallen asleep by this point, then it’ll be these moments that finally drift them off.
If any lesson can be gleaned from JUSTIN AND THE KINIGHTS OF VALOUR, it’s that Antonio Banderas should leave the making of animated films to the professionals. Simply put, the film is a mess, an unconvincing mish-mash of recycled jokes from much better movies. Avoid it at the cinema and simply edit together YouTube clips from various Dreamworks and Pixar movies – the final product will be a lot more entertaining then anything Banderas and his team can ever dream of producing.
JUSTIN & THE KNIGHTS OF VALOUR is out in UK cinemas nationwide now.
