Singer’s film, too, once bore “Killer” in its title, until some combination of market research and fretting over pop-culture violence prompted a change. Jack the Giant Slayer has its roots in “Jack the Giant Killer,” an 18th-century Cornish fable set during Arthurian times and featuring a Jack who was more of a wily rapscallion than an emergent Joseph Campbell hero.

Simply put: Any five minutes of this is preferable to all of The Hobbit. At less than two hours, Jack also has a sure sense of pacing and knows when to make a graceful exit-qualities nearly as rare at the movies today as 35mm prints, good projection, and well-behaved audiences. And though there’s no shortage of computer graphics at work here, the movie maintains the tactile, handcrafted look of those beloved childhood books where, with each successive turn, some new marvel literally popped up from the page. Working with his regular cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel, Singer shoots in clean, unfussy compositions that allow us to follow the action easily even when the earth moves under the characters’ feet and the sky comes tumbling down. It’s more Jason and the Argonauts than Shia and the Transformers. In Jack-surely his most lighthearted, purely pleasurable film-Singer evokes another era of fantasy filmmaking when the illusions before our eyes were created in an artist’s studio rather than a computer lab. The director is Bryan Singer, whose X-Men films have always struck me as comic-book cinema at its most mirthless and heavy-handed, but whose non-mutant movies reveal the touch of a supremely confident Hollywood craftsman, from the jackknife film noir The Usual Suspects to the plot-to-kill-Hitler thriller Valkyrie.

Indeed, it’s one of the pleasures of Jack that the film’s tone is more classical fairy tale than hipster graphic novel, replete with swashbuckling derring-do, beautiful distressed maidens, valiant knights on horseback, and characters who speak in whole sentences rather than quips and catchphrases. And what would a big-budget, mildly revisionist, 3-D spin on “Jack and the Beanstalk” be if those fearsome beasties didn’t somehow make it down to sea level, where a storybook British kingdom looms-given said giants’ appetite for human flesh-like a medieval Whole Foods? That journey is facilitated, of course, by the eponymous Jack (Nicholas Hoult), who has thankfully been allowed to remain a naive farm boy in this telling of the tale, despite Hollywood’s unyielding desire to turn all formerly innocuous childhood icons into lethal vampire and witch hunters or-in the case of poor Santa Claus in last year’s excruciating Rise of the Guardians-a tattooed Russian gangster.

To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, there are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky in Jack the Giant Slayer.

Jack the giant killer budget