Artemis Fowl (2020)

This was an absolute mess.
I read the first few books when they released in the early 2000s, but I’m positive they weren’t as stupid and plot-holey as this movie was.
The basic premise of the series was that Artemis Fowl Sr. (Colin Farrell) was somewhere between a modern-day Indiana Jones and a high-stakes art thief, stealing priceless artifacts from museums that turned out to be priceless magical artifacts that Fowl Sr. decided it was his duty to protect from magical evil forces.
Fowl Sr. disappeared and it was up to Artemis Fowl Jr. (introducing Ferdia Shaw) to figure out where he went and how to get him back.

The magical kidnapper, Opal Koboi (uncredited), was a faceless, enigmatic goon in a trenchcoat and hood, who was apparently very good at kidnapping and literally nothing else. In exchange for Fowl Sr.’s life, Koboi wanted the Arconos, a macguffin that happened to look exactly like a large, glowing, metal acorn. Koboi didn’t know where the Arconos was, he (they?) just wanted it for the powers it contained.
Apparently the Arconos was the key to all magic in the universe, because some idiot decided to make that a tangible object. It would be on par with someone making a literal lightswitch for the sun, telling the world about its existence, then leaving it in a closet and hoping no one would ever try to steal it for nefarious deeds.

Unrelated to that: Sergeant Holly Short (Lara McDonnell) was a police/paramilitary officer in the secret underground city of Haven, where she was only marginally better than a screw-up, and her boss was Judy Dench practicing her best gravel-voiced Batman impression as “Commander Root.”     
And for reasons unknown, the first 20 minutes of this movie were narrated by Mulch Diggums (Josh Gad), who was being interrogated by MI6, and was also, inexplicably, doing his best gravel-voiced Batman impression.
I have no idea why director Kenneth Branagh thought “yes, growling dialog is what the books were lacking,” but unfortunately he did, and we are all worse off for it.

So Officer Root gave Sergeant Short a mission to go to the surface to retrieve a rogue magical beast who’d managed to escape and decided that the best use of its time was to cause havoc, because of course it did.

The process of getting from the center of the earth was inconsistent and stupid. When Holly Short needed to get to the surface, she rode in a metal capsule that got blasted up and out of Mt. Vesuvius in Italy, via a plume of lava and pressure. Later, when other elves needed to get to the surface, they just conveniently popped out of a special doorway underwater along whatever coast was relevant.

Holly’s mission was to find an escaped troll in a small town in Italy, so maybe the fastest way to get there was via Vesuvius, but as Italy is surrounded by water just like the coastline of everywhere else, the rickety copper pot-shot seemed like an unnecessary inconvenience.

And Holly’s mission: the troll managed to walk its way up into a town square during a wedding, where no one saw a 10’ tall, lumbering green beast, nor heard it approach. It didn’t seem to be a loud wedding and there was enough light that someone besides one 10 year old girl should have seen it.
Holly was supposed to somehow mitigate the troll by herself – despite being the size and stature of a tween girl.  When that failed, a small elf contingent showed up with a ‘time stop’ dome and activated it over the town square.
Not the whole town, mind you, just the square.
Reasonably, someone not invited to the wedding could have looked out their bedroom window and seen the scene of troll-caused destruction frozen before them, including people and objects impossibly suspended in the air. Once everything was frozen, the elves set to work pulling people back to the ground, spiriting the troll onto a spaceship, and wiping out everyone’s memories like the Men in Black.
At least with the Men in Black, they had some marginally reasonable answer for whatever just happened, like an alien-caused explosion being explained away as swamp gas.
Here, the elves just flashed everyone’s memories then disappeared, leaving the wedding trashed and no one in any of the positions they’d been before the troll showed up, which meant that every single guest would be facing the ultimate “WTF?!” moment while they tried to figure out why and how the venue had - from their perspective - spontaneously and instantly exploded around them.

And I mentioned that the elves had a spaceship. I don’t know what else to describe it as: it was a large, floating metal thing that clearly had joystick controls and defied most of the laws of physics.

I don’t know who came up with this “there’s a secret civilization that has world-altering technologies, but they’re hidden away ‘cause they’re scared of humans” trope, but it’s stupid and I hate it. It didn’t make sense in “Harry Potter” (1997-2007) or “Black Panther” (2018), and I don’t know why it keeps getting used.
I understand the premise that elves went into hiding generations ago because humans were a threat. Like in “Maleficent” (2014), where iron was the one material that could mortally wound a faery. So humans figured out the elvish weakness forever ago. Got it.
But here, in 2020, the elves clearly had better flight capabilities, energy weapons, and time bombs. There’s no fathomable reason why they continued to stay secret and hidden, when they easily could have risen up and taken control of the surface world.
There could have at least been an off-handed comment for why the elves didn’t want to be on the surface, like that UV light caused them to catch on fire, or that the oxygen levels in our air was on par with meth to them. Give me something to explain why the superior-firepower entity was afraid of modern humans and our counter-intuitive stupidity.

There was an unnecessarily long, drawn out scene of a troll ruining the inside of Fowl Mansion, Mulch Diggums dug his way in by unhinging and widening his jaw, and a wholly pointless subplot about  an officer named Chix Verbil (Jake Davies) who had a vague, unexplained authority to overthrow Commander Root, but in a way that had zero effect and zero pay off and never wrapped up in any way before the movie ended.

Oh, and the time stop dome appeared again when an elvish army decided to attack Fowl Mansion, except this time it did nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Artemis was in the mansion when the time dome got activated, and yet he just walked right outside like everything was normal. No special gizmo was shown, no additional curses or blessings or hexes or whatever. Just a non-effect.
Why did Branagh waste any time establishing that device and its abilities if he was just going to completely ignore it later?!

And there was much more stupidity in this, but I’m already well into my 4th page on my word doc as I write this non-chronologically, so I’ll just let it fester inside.

The book series was written for kids and I’ve clearly grown out of the age demographic. I wasn’t supposed to be the target audience for the movie.
Except that I was.
The first book came out in 2001, and I read it. As I said above, I think I read two or three of them as they released.
And while I grew out of the series like I did with “Animorphs,” author Eoin Coffer continued to write “Artemis Fowl” books through 2012.
I was approximately 9 when I read the first book, and I’m 28 now. For anyone older than me who read the books and now has kids of book-reading/movie-comprehending age, Disney was relying on our love of the 20(ish)-year-old books to want to bring our kids to see it.
Alternatively, the book series ended in 2012, so if an 8-year-old read them then, they’d be 16 now, though I highly doubt this would be a “cool” movie to go see.
Somehow, Disney targeted two different movie-going audiences here and managed to botch it for both. No 16-year-old will see this and think “Oh, that 12-year-old Artemis is super cool,” and no 28-year-old riding the nostalgia wave is going to think that any part of that movie did the book series right.

Disney is really lucky that their planned release date for this movie was Spring of 2020, because the COVID pandemic stopped this movie from being an absolute cinematic disaster.
Imagine if they’d released this in theaters?! There’s no way they’d make a profit on it; it would have been this year’s laughing stock.
Instead, they got to quietly release it on their Disney+ streaming service and just kinda…forget about it.
Heck, they could even play it off as a movie made explicitly for streaming release and they could get away with it now.
Lucky break.

The final scene of the movie showed Artemis, on the phone with Opal, and his closing line of dialog was “I’m a criminal mastermind.”
Which… no.
He’s not. He wasn’t.
There wasn’t a single thing he did in the movie that was criminal or mastermind. He happened to know a lot of mystical lore and was so very lucky that the lore he knew was correct - dwarves like treasure, elves can hypnotize you, etc - otherwise his entire plan would have completely collapsed.
If anything, Artemis Fowl Jr. was impossibly lucky. While he was described as some kind of boy-genius, his actions proved to be nothing more than “average” while everyone around him happened to be pants-on-head incompetent.

The special effects were good enough. There was a centaur who, when he moved, looked like two dudes wearing a horse costume, which was incredibly unsettling, but otherwise the CGI was tolerable.

The music was the one highlight of this Anglo-nightmare. There was tense music for fight scenes and everything else had some kind of Irish/celtic traditional sounding twang to it, which I definitely appreciate.

This movie was better than the dumpster fire that was “Mortal Engines” (2018), as its driving plot device was slightly less stupid and I didn’t hate any of the main characters nearly as much.
It wasn’t good though.
I’m glad this didn’t get a theatrical release, because it didn’t deserve one, and it’s painfully clear that Disney wants to make a series out of this, as there are a handful of books to work from. With how bad this was, I can’t imagine it getting any number of sequels.
It’s not even good enough to sit at the big-kids table with the other ‘direct to streaming’ releases.
Do not waste your time.