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Vin Diesel goes medieval in 'Last Witch Hunter'

Immortal warrior Vin Diesel teams with a rebel witch (Rose Leslie) to quell a black magic uprising.

Being a witch hunter is apparently harder than it looks. Playing one made even the venerated Jeff Bridges look bad: In "Seventh Son," the dude did not abide.

Now comes "The Last Witch Hunter." The title role goes to Vin Diesel, who can bench press more than Bridges but is likely to end his career with fewer Oscars.

We fear for Diesel, and our fears are justified almost immediately. In the prologue, a flashback finds him in medieval Europe (some place called "Snowsylvania"), leading a band of "Game of Thrones" extras into the trunk of a demon tree where they aim to kill a leather-skinned sorceress.

Not since Tony Curtis in "The Black Shield of Falworth" has a New Yorker been so misplaced - and Curtis at least was allowed to retain his own hairdo.

Diesel is made to look like a Metallica roadie, with a braided beard, a William Shatner wig and berserker garb, but left to make a stab at Old English diction with nothing but his nawmal voice.

"Fire and iron" says Vin, brandishing a flaming broadsword, looking like someone in David Copperfield's Vegas show.

He does kill the witch, though, an act she repays thusly: "I curse you with life. You will live forever."

And so is revealed the black magic behind the "Fast and Furious" movies.

Cut to present day: Kaulder (Diesel) has spent the last 700 years witch hunting, an apparently prosperous line of work that now has him living like a hedge-fund king in a Manhattan penthouse where flight attendants come and go and he sits around wearing Armani amid the ancient artifacts he's accumulated over the ages.

One is Michael Caine, a priest who functions as an adviser and referee - Diesel's job is to preserve a longstanding truce between humans and witches, and to kill or jail bad witches and warlocks when they get out of line.

Which is of course what happens next, in a narrative that's somewhere between "Lord of the Rings" and "Ghostbusters." An ancient evil awakens, the witch prepares to return and her minions infest the streets of New York (actually Pittsburgh).

And look, there's Frodo. Elijah Wood turns up as Caine's successor and Kaulder's sidekick, until Kaulder acquires a prettier one - Chloe (Rose Leslie), a good witch who becomes mankind's ally when the bad witches wreck her bar.

This sounds like trashy fun, but it's not. "The Last Witch Hunter" is inert, and we cannot blame Diesel so much as the strange story, which marches forth with no visible villain.

The witch minions don't register as characters, Caine is in a coma spell for most of the movie, and the witch herself doesn't materialize until the final moments. In the meantime, we gaze at an unimpressive array of special effects.

When the witch war comes, it's so brief and low key that New Yorkers barely notice, and no wonder. The Mets are on.

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