Troll Hunter micro-review

Troll Hunter is all mockumentary concept — there’s trolls! no rly! — and no story or characters, which makes it easy to micro-review. I was tickled, for about half an hour, by the sheer cinematic chutzpah of rendering fat-nosed, fairy-tale-style trolls in an otherwise “realistic” film. By the end, I was enjoying the Norwegian scenery much more than the queasy-cam view of trolls rampaging through it. The film fails because it is much too silly to be scary (of course), because it’s not nearly silly enough to be funny either, and because you can’t possibly give a damn about the characters (you never can in found-footage films). I only LOLed once: when the government troll hunter points to high-tension power lines and proclaims that, despite appearances, it’s actually an electric fence for giant trolls. But that was a meta laugh: those cheeky-monkey filmmakers! That was the maximum entertainment level here.