The Witcher Season 4 review: Liam Hemsworth isn’t the problem

Let’s get this out of the way: Liam Hemsworth actually makes a very strong Geralt of Rivia. Hemsworth takes up the mantle In season 4 of Netflix The witchercapture by Henry Cavill. Although it might be distracting at first, especially since Cavill played the role so well, it only took a few episodes before I could see the new face underneath the blonde wig. He still knows how to use a sword, and still answers most questions with the weird “fuck.” The problem isn’t that the series has a new lead actor; It’s still a bloated mess, and Season 4 doesn’t do anything to fix that.

In case you forgot – I definitely forgot – Despite the promising startIn the third season, Geralt Cavill Literally limping across the finish line As the show once again begins to separate its three main characters. At the start of the new season, a bruised and bloodied Geralt leads a group of people, including his old friend Jaskier (Joey Batey), on a quest to find and rescue his surrogate daughter Ciri (Freya Allan). Meanwhile, Ciri has been magically transported to a distant desert, and is now secretly living with a group of fun-loving thieves, while a fake version of herself sits on the throne that Geralt is headed for. Meanwhile, Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) leads her own group, trying to rally support among her fellow wizards to take on the show’s current big villain, an all-powerful wizard named Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu).

Did you get all that? It could be a lot. And listen, I know fantasy epics can get complicated, and this isn’t The witcher It’s supposed to be a simple story. But the supply was steady Shifting its focus since season twomoving to tell a larger continent-wide story rather than focusing on the core trio of leads. Through this, what was created was lost The witcher Interesting and unique in the first place. At this point, you really have to look closely to find out what makes this different from the plethora of fantasy shows out there.

When they are at their best, long wars and political intrigues erupt The witcher As a background. It’s important, but it’s far from the most important. The witcher – and this is true whether we’re talking about the series, the books or the games – it’s like a dark fantasy detective series, where Geralt travels from place to place killing monsters, and is inevitably unwittingly drawn into some kind of drama, usually the very bad kind. It provides a ground-level view of a broken world often absent from fiction. Most importantly, it is Hazar; Violent and exciting, it balances tragedy, horror and dry humor.

But as those background elements — the political maneuverings of various countries, the logistics of war, the endless games of deception played by the royal elite — move to the fore, the show becomes something else. It’s bloated and, more often than not, boring.

Season 4 has some rare bright spots. There are two great new characters – an alarmingly efficient bounty hunter named Leo (Sharlto Copley) and Laurence Fishburne as a mysterious herbalist with a dark past – and in one clever episode where Geralt and his friends sit around a campfire telling tales of their early lives, each story is told in a different form, from a musical score to an animated blood festival. But the new characters are underutilized, and while the campfire episode is a welcome diversion, it’s not enough to cover the rest of the season, which mostly consists of people wandering off on a mission or planning a big heist or battle.

The current state of the show is particularly frustrating because The witcher It can be an absolute blast. The first season of the Netflix series proved thatand earlier this year the streaming device was released An excellent animated film called Sirens from the depths Which goes back to those basic basics. It was sad, funny, exciting, and, just as importantly, filled with a lot of fantastic monsters. Almost all of these elements are missing or under-represented in the final season, burying them all under generic fantasy storytelling. It starts with Neo Geralt dismembering a giant creature, and then it’s all downhill from there.

Maybe the reason it didn’t bother me as much about Hemsworth taking on Geralt is because that version of the character just doesn’t matter anymore. He’s still out there, occasionally killing monsters, but he’s no longer at the center of this story. With her plan to transform her version of The witcher inside An expanded franchise complete with prequelsNetflix has relegated the best parts of the series to the background. And that’s not something you can blame on Liam Hemsworth.

_{Season 4 of The witcher Streaming now.}