It is difficult for me to imagine a more ill-conceived feature film than this one. Even with television audiences embracing shows like “Once Upon a Time” and “Grimm,” the idea of bringing fairy tales to life on the big screen is dubious at best. Fantasy is the in thing, what with Middle Earth tales and vampire tales and even zombie tales, but updating children’s tales by injecting R-rated dialogue, sexuality and a lot of gore is a movie trend that makes me want to stay at home.
On the plus side, Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters has an amusingly stupid title, attractive leads, lots of 3-D effects and some inventive CGI effects. But everything else is on the minus side. Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton display no chemistry at all together. Arterton looks hot in tight leather pants but her facial expressions are rather limited. Thankfully for her, the script doesn’t demand much emotion. Renner seems like he is sleepwalking much of the time. Pretty Pihla Viitala strips for a skinny dip with Renner, and that’s about the only time he seems involved.
What I really hate about this junk is its misogyny. There is plenty of violence, but it is about witch hunting, so violence comes with the territory, I suppose. The problem for me is that so much of the violence is against women, and it is so brutal. All of the witches are women, of course, and dozens of them are shot, stabbed, burnt or likewise blown into smithereens one way or another. But it isn’t just that; Gretel is set upon not only by witches but an evil sheriff (Peter Stormare) and his henchmen in a particularly vicious scene. Hansel uses brass knuckles to clobber a captive witch to get information in another scene. Mina (the aforementioned Viitala) is nearly drowned by the sheriff and attacked later on as well. This movie delights in the beating up of women, particularly Gretel. The illusion is that Gretel is so tough that she can take it like her brother, and that the witches are tougher than the people hunting them, but the beatings are so nasty that the illusion does not hold. This movie, like an apple, suffers from a really rotten, woman-hating core.
That doesn’t even take into account the children (including the young versions of Hansel and Gretel) being put into peril — a dozen of them are to be sacrificed to the witches at the climax. Or the casual profanity that Hansel and Gretel spout every once in a while, just because they are not expected to say such things. The language and weaponry is anachronistic, which to me undermines everything about the story, but such contradiction is part of the in-joke, as it was with Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Well, the in-joke of it all just isn’t funny, or fun, and this movie is not entertaining. It is, like Movie 43, so much celluloid garbage. ☆. 13 February 2013.