Two and a Half Torches (Out of Five)
American fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books may well be delighted by The Color of Magic, a four-hour adaptation of two books in the series that previously aired on British television, debuting this Sunday on ION Television.
Everyone else will probably be unimpressed.
Still, the production’s impressive cast includes The Lord of the Ring’s Sean Astin, The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Tim Curry, the voice of Christopher Lee (as Death), and Jeremy Irons (in a cameo).
In the magical realm of Discworld, Rincewind (the wonderfully expressive David Jason) may be the most incompetent wizard of all time; after 40 years, he haven’t been able to learn a single spell. Finally, he’s expelled from the wizards’ university, and all seems lost — until he happens upon Twoflower (Astin), Discworld’s first tourist, who wants nothing more than to experience some very specific adventures.
Better still, Twoflower is rich.
After an accident in an inn, Rincewind and Twoflower set off across the land, and Twoflower gets his adventures, one by one. And it seems that Rincewind isn’t such a terrible wizard after all; in actuality, his head holds a spell so powerful that no other magic wants to be next to it.
But a Ymper Trymon (Curry), a power-hungry wizard at the academy, has his own designs on the spell inside Rincewind’s head.
The tone of The Color of Magic (which aired in the U.K. as The Colour of Magic) is sort of a poor-man’s Terry Gillium: all of the wackiness, none of the genuine wit.
Some of the jokes are mildly amusing. “What’s a tourist?” someone asks when Twoflower first appears. “I think it means ‘idiot,’” is the response. And later, Twoflower conjures up a dragon by simply believing that it exists — which works perfectly until he falls asleep when they’re riding on its back, and the dragon disappears in mid-air. Meanwhile, Rincewind can’t conjure the dragon back because he “doesn’t believe” in them — despite the fact that he was just riding on one.
But much of the humor falls flat — or perhaps doesn’t translate to American audiences. Twoflower’s luggage, for example, walks on legs of its owns — a detail that might be charming on the page, but which just seems inexplicably weird on screen. At one point, an old man is discussing a younger girl. “If I was 20 years younger…” he says, then adds, “I’d be 67.”
If you think that joke is funny, you’ll love The Color of Magic.
Worse, the flippant tone, and the paper-thin characters, make it difficult to invest much in the story. When a whole project seems designed just to get to the next joke or wacky situation, when you get the sense that even the creators don’t really care about the characters, you don’t either.
The series’s biggest problem is the pacing, which at times is molasses-slow. Long sequences seem to have been included to please the fans of the enormously popular books, but much of the film still feels like padding. Meanwhile, the overall narrative is slight.
This project is definitely best appreciated by Prachett fans.
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