Willow The Series Turns Willow The Movie Into CW Swill

I haven’t been this disappointed in a Disney+ project yet. Not even the lame The Book Of Boba Fett did as much to tarnish a legacy as the new series Willow does. Below, find out with no spoilers why I think this sequel to the 1988 movie Willow is such a massive let-down.

The series Willow takes place roughly 20 years after the movie. Returning are Warwick Davis as Willow Ufgood and Joanne Whalley as Sorsha. Through flashbacks you find out that not long after the events of the movie, Willow and Sorsha had a falling out over how to deal with the prophesied infant Elora Danan, so Willow took her away and hid her. In the intervening years Sorsha married and had two twins, Kit (Ruby Cruz from Mare of Easttown) and Airk (Dempsey Bryk), who are the main drivers of the plot in the first three episodes, which I got to see as an advance screening.

Eventually joining Kit on a quest to find Willow to help them with a problem is knight-in-training Jade (Erin Kellyman from The Falcon and The Winter Soldier) who may be Kit’s girlfriend, Kit’s betrothed Graydon (Tony Revolori from the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies), Airk’s kitchen maid girlfriend Dove (Ellie Bamber from The Serpent) and Amar Chadha-Patel (The Wheel Of Time) as Boorman, a thief and swordsman clearly filling in for the Madmartigan archetype.

The problems start with the writing. The series was created by Jonathan Kasdan, who also was a writer on three episodes. Kasdan’s only other writing credits of note are one episode of Freaks and Geeks, four episodes of Dawson’s Creek (boy does that show) and the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story. Hs only producer credit of any familiarity is as a co-producer on Solo. The only other writers with multiple episode credits are John Bickerstaff and Julia Cooperman, best known for writing for the series Grounded and Jupiter’s Legacy, respectively.

Willow‘s plot is barely there, and the dialogue is even worse. Nobody says anything that sounds like actual sentences that would come out of an actual person’s mouth. And when they do speak, it is American standard Young Adult vernacular. While the movie wasn’t Shakespeare by any means, at least it tried to sound like it wasn’t set in Encino. Warwick Davis gets all the props for making his dialogue at least slightly interesting, even if all the writers give him in these first three episodes is declarative statements and exposition that is supposed to Sound Important. Davis almost makes it actually sound like something we should pay attention to.

The production value in sets, cinematography, costumes and props, is mid-tier or below. How can Disney+ make something of the production quality of the amazing Andor, and Willow — which would look right at home as a 1990s Xena spinoff — in the same year? Same season of the year, even.

Fight choreography is clumsy at best and embarrassing at worst. One rare standout is Chadha-Patel, who actually looks like he understands he is in a fantasy action-comedy. He moves well, is believable as a fighter wielding an almost anime-size big sword and elicits an occasional chuckle with his delivery of the otherwise cliché funny lines. Revolori is OK as Graydon, probably from his experience in the Spider-Man movies, but nobody else has the chops to deliver the awful dialogue with any believability.

The fact that this review was embargoed until the day the series premiered says a lot about what the studio thought about how it would be reviewed. Since there are just eight episodes in total, I will be watching the rest of the series Willow to see if it improves. But if it doesn’t, I’ll be holding my nose throughout all five, and dreaming of what might have been if they had given this project to people with actual fantasy writing experience. Or any depth of experience at all, to be fair. If you want to see a very good series sequel to a fantasy movie from the same period, go watch Wednesday on Netflix.

I give Willow 2022 (Imagine Entertainment, Lucasfilm Television; no rating listed but likely PG; 8 eps.) a 2 out of 5.

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