I’m sure you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel, two
little kids, brother and sister, who get lost in the woods and find their way
to a cabin made of candy. Inside sits a witch, ready to fatten them up and cook
them for dinner. They manage to burn her in her own oven and escape. And that’s
that. It’s a nice story, isn’t it? What Hansel
& Gretel: Witch Hunters supposes is that this childhood encounter left
the kids with a talent for slaying sorceresses, a talent they take on the road,
roaming the countryside from village to village, peddling their ability to
liberate towns from the terror of witchcraft in their midst. We pick up with
them as adults, walking into a village that has been hit by a string of
kidnappings, youngsters spirited away by shadowy magic into the blackest part
of the forest never to be heard from again. Hansel and Gretel take the case,
promising to slay the witch(es) involved and return the kids to their parents.
Writer-director Tommy Wirkola (of the lame Nazi zombie
half-comedy Dead Snow) came up with
an inventive twist on a Grimm tale and then stopped there, wanly elaborating
upon a simple story until it becomes yet another dour, emotionless action
movie. It charmed me at first, in its opening minutes at least, but all too
quickly became plodding and predictable, running through its repetitive
motions. The violence is splashily over-the-top, giving the characters
rapid-fire crossbows, heavy firearms and the standard hyper-competence in murkily
choreographed, supposedly improvisatory hand-to-hand combat. Witches are slashed
apart in gruesome ways and return the favor by casting spells that cause men to
eat bugs and explode or get stepped upon by a troll, which sends what looks like
grape jelly splattering under the beast’s boot. And not a bit of it is exciting
or involving in the slightest.
The plot proceeds dumbly and dutifully through one of the
simplest, most emotionally and creatively uncomplicated possible versions of
this concept. As the adult Hansel and Gretel, Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton,
who are generally appealing actors even in dry material, appear to be going
through the motions dispirited and listless. They are without chemistry of any
kind, between each other or anyone else in the cast and the movie calls upon
them to do very little with what amounts to nothing more than cardboard action
stereotypes dressed up in fairy tale drag. Little creative touches – Hansel
suffers from diabetes as a result of eating too much of that witch’s house way
back when – seem dropped in out of nowhere and come to mean very little in the
scheme of things.
Filling out the rest of the cast is a nice group of
supporting actors, from Famke Janssen as the Big Bad Witch to Peter Stormare as
a skeptical sheriff and Thomas Mann as a village teen with an exceedingly
understandable crush on Gretel. Their contributions are nonstarters as well,
ground under by the empty spectacle. It’s a goofy movie that refuses to overtly
comment upon its own goofiness while at the same time carefully avoiding taking
itself seriously. It’s an odd, uncommitted stance for such potentially
enjoyable trash to take. As is, it plays like someone went into the editing
room and scrupulously snipped out every bit of humor and excitement, leaving
only an 88-minute husk of a good idea, a one-joke movie that never even finds
the energy to tell it with any skill.
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