Disney’s film adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s 2001 middle-grade fantasy novel, Artemis Fowl, has been a long time coming. Its first teaser trailer, released way back in 2018, said that it would premiere in August 2019; this was later pushed to May 2020. After the COVID-19 pandemic closed movie theaters around the world, Disney released the film on its streaming service, Disney+, on June 12. The final product, however, was hardly worth the wait.

The original book tells the tale of 12-year-old genius Artemis Fowl II, the son of a former crime lord who disappeared a few years earlier under mysterious circumstances; since then, his mother has suffered from mental illness. The Fowl family’s fortune has dwindled, so the younger Artemis formulates a plan that draws on his research into a secret underground civilization of fairy people—one that including elves, dwarves, goblins, and other fantasy beings. With the help of his formidable bodyguard, Domovoi Butler, and Butler’s younger sister, Juliet, Fowl eventually kidnaps Holly Short, an elf member of the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance force. (The force is also known as “LEPrecon”—one of many eye-rolling puns in the narrative; there are also jokes about flatulence and other bodily functions.) It’s all part of young Fowl’s scheme to extort one ton of gold from the fairies; along the way, he also manages to cure his mother’s illness, with the help of some fairy magic.

To say that Oscar-nominated director Kenneth Branagh’s movie version takes liberties with the source material is an understatement; it’s almost as if he examined every element of the story and asked himself, “Can I arbitrarily change this?” Artemis Fowl is no longer a cold-as-ice tactician; he’s a likable kid who surfs and rides skateboards in his spare time—although he still says lines such as “I’m Artemis Fowl and I’m a criminal mastermind.” (He’s played by Ferdia Shaw, the grandson of Jaws actor Robert Shaw.) Fowl’s mother is dead, in keeping with Disney-film tradition, and his father, played by Colin Farrell, is abducted by a fairy villain named Opal Koboi (from Colfer’s second series entry, 2002’s Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident). Fowl still goes through with the kidnapping, but his goal isn’t gold; now, he’s looking to obtain a magical artifact called the Aculos for his father’s ransom—a vaguely defined McGuffin that doesn’t exist in the books.

Josh Gad plays dwarf Mulch Diggums—a distinctly minor player in the book; in the film, he’s an annoying narrator and co-star who reels off endless exposition. Judi Dench plays Short’s commanding officer, Commander Root—and her performance is a vast improvement on the book’s cigar-chomping male cliché—but why was teen actor Lara McConnell, a White actor, cast as Short, a character whose skin color is explicitly stated to be brown?

Another character—a powerful fairy from the book’s opening scene—appears in the film’s original teaser trailer, but doesn’t show up in the final film. She’s played by the wonderful actor Hong Chau, who was brilliant in the recent HBO miniseries Watchmen; viewers can watch her deleted Artemis Fowl scene on Disney+, if they’d like to see what might have been. Chau is still in the film, after a fashion, as the voice of Opal Koboi—a performance for which she’s isn’t even officially credited. One can take solace in Chau’s excellent performance in the Amazon Prime Video show Homecoming, whose second season premiered last month.

Nearly all of these changes are to Artemis Fowl’s detriment, but even on its own merits, the film is unsatisfying. The editing is choppy and incoherent, particularly during the garbled action scenes; the plentiful CGI effects look cheap and unconvincing; and despite the actors’ best efforts, the characters feel more like cardboard cutouts than actual people. Fans of the books will likely be angry, and newcomers will wonder why anyone liked the Artemis Fowl series in the first place—and both may wish that they could magically get 95 minutes of their lives back.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.