Tolkien

A fairly bottom-of-the-barrel biopic, Tolkien follows Nicholas Hoult’s J. R. R. Tolkien as he befriends a group of students at a prestigious school for boys and eventually falls in love with Lily Collins’ Edith Bratt – with the outbreak of the First World War threatening the iconic figure’s various relationships. Filmmaker Dome Karukoski immediately establishes a paint-by-numbers atmosphere that proves utterly disastrous, as Tolkien, which actually opens with the protagonist at war before flashing back to his childhood (really?), has been suffused with a relentlessly generic feel that effectively (and completely) renders its few positive attributes moot – which is a shame, certainly, given that Hoult’s relatively strong performance is matched by a solid supporting cast. (Colm Meaney, cast as Tolkien’s guardian and father figure, is especially good here.) There’s little doubt that Tolkien‘s dearth of competent elements paves the way for a sluggish, mostly interminable midsection, and it’s clear, too, that Karukoski’s efforts at juicing up the picture’s war sequences with images of various creatures and monsters comes off as silly and desperate – with the end result a thoroughly unpleasant and incompetent endeavor that seems unlikely to appeal even to Tolkien’s most ardent fans.

* out of ****