Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2013

Fee fi ho-hum. Hollywood’s latest fairy tale “re-imagining” gets points for not straying too far from its simple source material (ala the dreadful Alice in Wonderland). Problem is, the tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk” takes five minutes, outside, to tell. That leaves, lessee, 110 minutes between “Once Upon a Time” and “Happily Ever After” to fill, and this is done with seemingly endless, screen-saver-level CGI made even duller by shabby 3-D. As legume-based adventure-fantasies go, it’s not terrible. Slow kids will find it diverting. But there’s little spark, and by the end it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.