WILLOW (1988)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Sword-and-sorcery swashbuckling, epic battles on horses with spears thrown, giant castles too high to scale, revolting witches, beautiful princesses, chivalrous heroes, boar-like creatures - geez, what's not to like? "Willow" has an assembly line of all the expected tropes of such fanciful tales of yore yet there is no real sense of fun or magic. Sure, a few thrills but nothing you haven't seen done before and better. It's "Princess Bride" mixed with some "Star Wars" and that is no surprise the latter comparison, considering "Willow" is a story conceived by George Lucas.
Warwick Davis is Willow, a little person in a village full of them. His prospects are not high but he is married and, one day, finds a baby on a raft floating on the water. The villagers and some Merlin-like wizard (Billy Barty), whose tricks are not always up to snuff, decide that Willow along with another villager should take the baby back to the Kingdom of Daikini after being attacked by those aforementioned man-eating boars! Now mind you, they should be aware that Daikini is where the baby came from in the first place, and there is a cruel Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) who kills mothers that send their babies out of the kingdom! Didn't anybody from this village read the Daikini Gazette?
Along the perilous journey, Willow (who can assume wizard-like powers summoned with a stick) meets a Big Person named Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), a Han Solo-like warrior, who can be clumsy and has a sense of humor (he wears a full female costume after being caught committing adultery). Along the way we also meet a couple of Lilliputian-like people who even tie up our heroes (Gulliver's Travels, anyone?) They are known as Brownies! And you Star Wars fans went psychotically nuts when Lucas went into his midichlorians phase in "Phantom Menace"?
As you can tell, I came in late to this mediocre cinematic 1988 offering clearly pilfering from the J.R.R. Tolkien bible. There is plenty of clanging sword action, an extended battle climax with one character wearing a Skeletor-like mask and a few chase scenes that do work, but the joy is not quite there. Kilmer and Warwick Davis are up to the task and they give animated performances but the movie directed by Ron Howard never quite takes a real flight of imagination. Aside from a fire-breathing two-headed dragon, nothing in "Willow" will surprise or delight you with sights and sounds you haven't seen or heard before.
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