Not only has Diesel plopped the mantle of Cage on his shoulders, he seems to have borrowed one of Cage’s justly celebrated hairpieces, since, in the period scenes, Diesel has some kind of deceased animal pelt affixed to his trademark bald dome. For that matter, the ending suggests he had notions of spawning a series. Diesel himself produced this movie, meaning he brought it on himself in the apparent belief that playing 800-year-old witch hunter - working for one of those super-top-secret branches of the Catholic Church - was a good idea. This is not simply a case of accepting a Cage cast-off (assuming such a thing exists). His direction might not showcase the full wit of the script, but it does honor its inventiveness: its gummy-bear tree, its charred yet smoldering witch corpses, its descent into the writhing tree-roots of hell, some business with a pulsing ancient heart, and a flaming sword, which of course is named Hexenbane.It would be sufficiently embarrassing to end up playing the kind of role we’ve come to expect to star Nicolas Cage, but Vin Diesel has upped the ante with The Last Witch Hunter. The joys are in the way director Breck Eisner, like Diesel, is earnest about this goofiness. What follows is urban-fantasy noir with crime scenes and clues and some inspired witchery. This time, Kaulder is investigating the death of a friend. Witches live among us but aren't allowed to jack with humans when they do, Kaulder collars them for the council's judgment. Everyone involved knows the audience can grasp a fantastical setup on the fly. Kaulder reports to some vague Witch Council, and he's partnered for centuries with helpmeet priests (Elijah Wood as the new guy Michael Caine as the one in his last week before retirement), but the movie leaves it to you to work out the geeky specifics.

Turns out 800 years back Diesel's character - Kaulder - got cursed, and now he's doomed to spend the rest of eternity stomping witches in Manhattan, a fate he finds enjoyable and highly remunerative. For now, we have The Last Witch Hunter, a $90 million supernatural time-killer that's mostly set in the here and now rather than in, say, Gary Gygax's Greyhawk, although the prologue is a not-bad nighttime RPG sword-and-sorcery adventure.

Some ambitious young screenwriter should send Vin Diesel 100 plotless pages of dungeon-delving and dragon-bashing, as that seems to be the movie he's looking for.

The last witch hunter cast music