The Seeker: The Dark is Rising: Critic Reviews

A movie that should've been made shortly after its source material -- Susan Cooper's Newbery winner -- debuted in 1973. As is, it feels entirely too generic to work today.

The Seeker feels passe and lacks a charismatic lead. Too bad Daniel Radcliffe is an only child.

A moderate Potter-teen fantasy about an American kid who comes to little old England with his family (dad's on some kind of academic posting) to find that he is the boy-king leader of a group of supernatural warriors.

The movie ultimately emerges as a lackluster tale of teenage empowerment and doesn't fully conjure the requisite sense of magical escape necessary to truly captivate and immerse us in the tale.

Poor writing and production values like these bring no light to Cooper's novel -- or the audience.

What exactly are The Light and The Dark? The filmmakers sincerely hope you don't ask.

A reasonable choice for bored tweens -- as long as they don't demand too much magic from their movies.

It's simply product for a pre-conditioned marketplace, pushing familiar buttons without doing anything remotely creative.

At its best, The Seeker is a pretty vivid fantasy book come-to-life; it does a decent, passable job of adding to the canon of kid-lit flicks.

Cooper presented this rather basic good/evil mythos in more low-key, atmospheric form than the film allows, leaving thesps (particularly McShane) having to poker-face their way through lines like, 'The future of the human race rests on you!'

Given superpowers, Will does approximately nothing with them (he can command fire, but uses it mainly to throw cool supertantrums). He's as passive as a dead mackerel.

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising is the first eye-popping, jaw-dropping installment in a film fantasy series that could turn out to be the new Harry Potter.

Director David L. Cunningham's proffered chills are strictly of the lightweight variety: a menacing flock of ravens, a slimy skein of snakes and a couple of mall security yobs too fat or stupid to overpower even a spindly teenager.

Whether you fully embrace the Harry Potter phenomenon or simply live with it, there's no question that J. K. Rowling is an imaginative story-spinner. The trouble is that she has ruined the field for the legions of the second-rate.

A ho-hum exercise in mysticism and hocus-pocus.

Director David L. Cunningham applies a jarring, disorienting style to much of the action that, rather than mirroring Will's inner confusion, distances the audience from his plight.

a lot of shouting offered up as an ineffectual camouflage to the picture's complete lack of ambition.

Sloppy, lifeless storytelling so limp it guarantees no sequels will be made.

The Seeker is great-looking and well-acted, but unlike the Potter books and films, there's no sense that it's about anything more than the throwing-balls-of-smoke and mind-melding that we see onscreen.

It's important, when criticising some of the more cliched elements here - the dark versus the light, the Tolkein parallels, the quests - to bear in mind that this film is aimed at older children, not your average jaded film critic.

Disappointing adaptation of a great kids' book.

The Dark is Rising is one of those awful sorcery tales where a spotty young boy (Alexander Ludwig) suddenly gets to save the Earth from supernatural creeps such as Christopher Eccleston.

Not-too-impressive CG effects and frenetic camera work but cannot mask what is--or, rather, what isn't there.