The new fantasy series has the violence and unpronounceable names but not the swagger

Considering he goes around killing monsters on request, the improbably chiselled and gruff Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) gets no thanks. Some of the ladies give this black-leather-clad hunk with the long silver hair the glad eye, but the more usual greeting is a curt “We don’t want your kind around here!” Even after he’s rid the village of a giant, pond-lurking spider. With its medieval stylings, sprawling narrative and liberal dusting of magic, Netflix’s The Witcher is presumably intended to fill the Game of Thrones-sized hole in viewers’ lives. Not forgetting the daft names. Fringilla. Stregobor. Jaskier.

It’s certainly violent enough. Why stab someone in the back or punch them in the face once, when you could do it a dozen times? Street fights, where ne’er-do-wells obligingly assail our hero one by one, throb to the whop-whop and ktsss of blade slicing flesh. There’s also the sudden-death protocol. Any character who shows the slightest spark one minute is liable to get snuffed out the next. The Witcher himself has a basic ethical code: don’t hit women. Unless you really have to, that is.

The plot gestures to the labyrinthine complexity of GoT with its triple narrative — fugitive princess, apprentice sorceress and our travelling beast-slayer. After a battle scene that is less about strategy and deployment than a thousand separate incidents of hand-to-hand combat, Ciri (Freya Allan) escapes the conflagration of her city with a loyal bodyguard. You feel for poor Anya Chalotra as misshapen Yennefer, having to go around with one shoulder hoisted up, a head permanently tilted and a wodge of cotton wool in her mouth. She will be beautiful one day, and it can’t come soon enough.

“Magic is organising chaos,” says her inscrutable instructress, which is no help at all when you’re told to move rocks with your mind. Sets and costumes (apart from Geralt’s) have a perfunctory air. The grubby-looking elves have sad little pointed ears and an aggrieved manner that suggests they can’t wait to get off the set. The horned, goat-eyed “Sylvan” is such a prosthetic fail it’s almost cute.

What on earth is going on? Jodhi May as the Queen delivers an indecipherable crib on current events before heading off to battle. Reticent Geralt attracts a tiresomely chatty follower, a lute-toting bard (Joey Batey). “There I go again, just delivering exposition,” he blabs, scratching desperately at the fourth wall. Characters in GoT were very sure of themselves. This lot look confused, and Cavill is like a rock in a stream, letting it all flow past him.