Axe Giant - Die Rache des Paul Bunyan

The scenery is really quite beautiful, the make-up for giant Bunyan is very well done and fearsome and Thomas Downey also was appropriately gruff and humorous. Unfortunately that is all that Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan has in its favour. Apart from the scenery, the look of the film is shoddy, with rushed-through special effects and editing and too many scenes that are shot too brightly. The giant Bunyan looks fearsome enough, but we don't know anything about him and he doesn't have that much of a personality, never coming across as genuinely menacing. And that does dilute things a lot. The dialogue has cheese and awkwardness written all over it, with the banter truly inane. The characters range from obnoxious(Joe Estevez) to bland(pretty much everybody else. The acting is bad really with the best it gets generally being forgettable, only Downey makes any kind of impression. Joe Estevez especially is so bad it's almost comical. What hurts Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan is the story, generally too padded and pedestrian with nothing exciting, suspenseful or even engaging with a lack of any heart. It also takes far too long to get going, we get forty minutes of tiresome and increasingly irrelevant banter before Bunyan arrives on the scene, and sadly even with his presence the movie never quite takes off. Overall, SyFy have done much worse and it is certainly nowhere near as bad as most of the stuff The Asylum has churned out, but still not a good movie at all. 3/10 Bethany Cox