Movie Review: Troll Hunter- Not quite as exciting as you might think

Released: October 2010

Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollhunter

*****Spoilers in review*****

Troll Hunter is one of those movies that I kept seeing in the supermarket, and a couple of times I was almost tempted into buying it. Mainly because of the cool looking 3D front cover, but also because I knew it was a foreign language movie, and as an old film student I’m particularly tempted by any movie that’s not in the English language.

Anyway, for one reason or another I didn’t buy the movie. I probably had too many comics to read and review or something like that. Yes, my life really is that dull. But give it time and eventually I’ll find just about every supermarket movie played late at night on Film4, and such was the case with this one. Now that I’ve actually seen it would it have bothered me to spend about £7 on it? Yeah, probably. I’d pay about £2 for it and be happy, but nothing more than that.

The movie has a few problems, and they all come from the script. It’s one of those ‘found footage’ movies that everybody is getting fed up of now. You know the type? Blair Witch shaky camera, documentary realism and a group of overly frightened, snotty nosed young adults.

In this particular movie the snotty kids are clandestinely filming what they think is a bear poacher, who very quickly turns out to be the one and only Norwegian Troll hunter. This Indiana Jones (Sr.) character is a Government Park Ranger of sorts whose job is to keep control of the native Troll population. He’s a bit like somebody working for the department of wildlife who has to cull a few rabid foxes/badgers every now and then. The only difference really is that he has to take care of giant Trolls, oh and not tell anybody about it, but that doesn’t appear to stop him happily spilling the beans about his Troll hunting activities on camera.

Yeah, it’s pretty stupid, and it makes zero sense that the government would employ ONE elderly man in a battered old Land Rover to take care of roaming Giants in the countryside. You’d think they’d have the army and airforce on the job, wouldn’t you? But no, one old bloke will do apparently.

And how come in this Internet age of every bugger having a camera on them there’s no photographs of these far from reclusive Trolls on the Internet? It’s not like they are very good at hiding or anything. They certainly ain’t no Bigfoot, Nessie or Abominable Snowman.  All the camera crew has to do is go out into the woods and they have the stupid Trolls all around them. They are as big as a house, and roar like a boy racer revving up at the traffic lights. You couldn’t miss them if you tried to.

Despite the slap your forehead stupidity of it all, the main problem I had with the movie was it’s lack of drama and suspense. Far too early on the Trolls are seen in close-up, slap bang in the middle of the screen, and even on night-vision camera, just so you can see absolutely every contour, angle and dimple on their big flabby arses. That to me was a completely inexplicable decision for the director to make. You have one thing going for you. One thing that will keep the audience glued to the screen. That being, what do the Trolls look like? Tease us. Show us a shadow, a blurred arm, a brief glimpse of something that could, or could not be a Troll. That’s the art of film-making, manipulating the audience, not sticking everything on a slab and poking it with a stick so many times that the audience begins to nod off or check their mobile phones.

This movie could have kept me mesmerised to the very end, but the director decided that he didn’t want to play it that way. No, he was going to turn what should have been a thrilling monster drama into a dull wildlife documentary, and that’s what he did. The rest of the movie is just a camera crew of dull student types following a previously taciturn, now chatty bloke around the country as he tells them every single thing they could possibly want to know about Trolls. Amazingly, he makes them sound quite dull. It’s like he’s talking about squirrels.

A ‘found footage’ movie about Trolls shouldn’t be this dull, but it really is very blah. There simply aren’t the characters, personalities, conflicts or dramas to sustain it all. There are couple of promising sub-plots (one that could have been interesting was whether or not Trolls hated Muslims as much as they hated Christians) but they are never fully developed, probably consigned to the cutting room floor, and the movie just kind of splutters to an end.

You’d think that Trolls would be scary, exciting, exotic and dangerous, wouldn’t you? But no, in this movie they’re just giant rabid pests who are easily controlled by one elderly man and his flashlight. I’ll include a couple of photographs of the Trolls themselves alongside this review, as the special effects were the only good thing about the movie. The Trolls looked great, but they were wasted. They were seen far too early and far too often, and all of the potential thrills, suspense and drama that the movie could, and should have offered, ended up being replaced by what amounted to a cinematic version of a yawning squirrel in a suburban back garden. What’s that you say? It was supposed to be a comedy? How come I didn’t laugh at any of it then? It wasn’t funny, at all. It was boring, very, very boring.
Rating: 3/10