The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising

The movie has a lot going for it, including wonderful sets and locations - in Bucharest, Romania! - that create a heightened-reality English hamlet with pub, church, manor and shops (make that shoppes!). And the lead actor, Ludwig, registers the growth spurts of the stripling hero with the sensitivity and precision of an emotional seismograph.

At its best, The Seeker is a pretty vivid fantasy book come-to-life; it does a decent, passable job of adding to the canon of kid-lit flicks.

Feels passé and lacks a charismatic lead. Too bad Daniel Radcliffe is an only child.

Starts out with promise but staggers under the weight of trying to take on too much. The tone is murky: The story attempts to blend adolescent angst with fantasy adventure, and the result is rather clunky.

This movie is a particular disappointment. Although The Seeker is in Walden's tradition of positive storytelling, John Hodge's script is guilty of downright goofy utterances on occasion.

A kid unversed in other name-brand fantasy movies might go for The Seeker, but in 2007 it's redundant, a puttering Potter without wit and whimsy.

None of this made a lick of sense to me, nor did it appear to be all that obvious to either the cast or screenwriter Hodge, whose work here feels as though he'd given up in frustration halfway through before deciding to see how far he could push the vaguely Harry Potter-esque shenanigans before getting sacked.

This movie had good intentions, but the end result is a dismal one. The story wobbles and limps throughout the film, and by the end it falls down and lands with an impact.

Just bad and terrible. The dialogue is literal and the movie was just overall boring.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]