Jack the Giant Slayer, review On its opening weekend in the US, Bryan Singer's Jack and the Beanstalk adaptation took $27 million: no small sum, admittedly, but half as much as Snow White and the Huntsman took on its release last June, and less than a quarter of the opening weekend of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, the film that prompted this craze in 2010. This is a pity, as Jack is an honest swashbuckling romp with appealing pantomime overtones, and one of the better fairy tale films to date. Its villains are a shadow of the drunken devils of old Albion: Cormoran, Thunderdell, Blunderbore and their ilk are richer, stranger creatures than this film's four-man scriptwriting team could dream up. But by bookending its story with scenes of storytelling, at least Jack shows some awareness of the seams of legend that run deep beneath our feet. Fast-forward ten years or so and that adventure comes, when Jack (Nicholas Hoult) fatefully trades his family's horse - not cow - for a pouch of beans. Meanwhile, Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) flees the palace after being betrothed to the King's scheming adviser Roderick, played by Stanley Tucci with a sneer to make Blackadder envious. Isabelle arrives at Jack's hovel in a rainstorm, the magic seeds are accidentally watered, and a tendrilous beanstalk bursts through the floorboards and stretches up into the sky like an enormous matted dreadlock. Up, up shoots the house with it, leaving Jack behind on terra firma, where the King (Ian McShane) and his unflappable, Errol Flynn-like chief guard Elmont (Ewan McGregor) find him the following morning. Up, up climb Jack, Elmont, Roderick and a phalanx of disposable soldiers to rescue Isabelle, until they reach an island in the sky where giants roam wild. The two-headed and apparently Belfast-raised ringleader of these beasts, played by a convincingly digitised Bill Nighy, has long nursed a grudge against humankind, and Roderick has plans for him and his disgruntled horde. Singer has most fun up here amongst the clouds, playing games with scale in a string of funny and inventive action set pieces enhanced by the film's clever use of 3D. It's thrilling to see Eddie Marsan's hapless human guardsman scamper towards the camera while a giant surveys him hungrily from the background - before running him down in enormous strides. A sequence based around the preparation of giant-sized sausage rolls is also gruesome fun, although perhaps a touch too gruesome for very young viewers. The customary castle-siege finale is less inspired, although at least this has narrative shape: the storytelling in Jack is smoother and more focused than it was in New Line Cinema's other recent fantasy offering, the interminable first instalment of The Hobbit (2012). Like Singer's X-Men films (2000 & 2003), and also his Oscar-garlanded debut The Usual Suspects (1995), Jack is a well-built picture in which a likeable cast have fun. And seeing that is often enough to convince us we are, too.