This is a sad state of literature we've descended into. Not only
are book shelves obsolete in homes and book stores going out of business, but
now the books themselves are being carved up into bastardized versions of anything
that passes as pop culture nowadays.
Here, for instance, is Hansel
& Gretel: Witch Hunters, a fairy tale turned into an action movie with kung-fu
witches and witch hunters who wield automatic guns even though the film seems
to be set in the 15th Century. The movie takes its cues from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by using
timeless characters to introduce mindless action violence to a story that would
otherwise have none. A finger should also be aimed at Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith's mash-up novel
that gave the all-clear to a horde of talentless copycats.
This is cheap, stupid moviemaking, lowest common denominator type
material. Aristotle Fights a Dragon. Gandhi Versus the Werewolves. Gatsby's Great Troll Hunt. Mark Twain: Beard Lice Executioner. See,
anyone can shoehorn a historical or literary character into a dopey action
film. I guess this is no different than those porcelain statues of Jesus
playing football or ice hockey or stock-car racing. Maybe our society deserves
material this thoughtless and trashy.
"Oh, you stick-in-the-mud, just roll with it and have some
fun," is what you may be thinking here at this point. I would have had fun
if there was any fun to be mined from Hansel
& Gretel. Their wasn't. I did have high hopes, though, because I thought
the movie was supposed to be a horror-comedy — certainly it would have landed better as a comedy — when all it aspired to be was a flavor of the week, a
been-there-done-that failure, a witless story unaware of its own source
material. Seriously, was Kate Beckinsale not available for another Underworld movie, is that why this was
made?
It stars Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as Hansel and Gretel,
the puritan children of a woodsman and a witch. Yeah, you read that part right —
a witch. If you didn't remember momma witch in the original fairy tale about
children in a witch's candy house, that's because it was just thrown in here to give
Hansel and Gretel a gritty backstory that explains how they're left in the
woods, immune to dark-magic spells (but not light-magic spells), come to fight
witches as a career choice, and … oh geez, I'm already exhausted explaining the
film's logic.
Hansel and Gretel are called to a sleepy forest village with a
rash of child abductions. There they find lots of witches, a troll and many,
many occasions for a gunfight. The brother-sister team use rotating-barrel
pistols, belt-fed machine guns, spiked grenades, foldable sniper rifles with cluster-bomb
bullets, devastating shotguns and spinning machine-crossbows that might as well
be Transformers. This is three movies in a row (after Gangster Squad and The Last
Stand) that has glorified guns to an uncomfortable degree. To Hansel & Gretel's credit, this is
the first film do it in an age when guns did not exist. (And don't get cute and
email me about how the Chinese had guns hundreds of years before this. The
Chinese never had guns like this.)
Renner — a recent Academy Award nominee for The Hurt Locker, let me remind you — sleep-reads his way through
this dreary plot, only occasionally showing that famous acting spark before
smothering it in mundane dialogue that is too frequently of this variety:
"Quick, over here," "Watch out," or "There she
goes." Arterton is a bit more plucky if only because all the other women
are plastic-haired witches with quite possibly the worst makeup effects in a Hollywood movie in recent memory. Now that the movie's over I wonder what Marilyn Manson's makeup team will be up to next.
Let me backtrack just a little: this could have been a hilarious
movie. Looking at some of the trailers, the marketing team even accentuated
some of the film's more comedic lines. Those moments are wasted in the actual
film. I was expecting some laughs at all the modern references — like the weapons,
a stun gun with a hand charger, a crude phonograph — juxtaposed against the
fairy-tale backdrop. Even Your Highness
found some gags that worked along those same lines. Instead the movie has two
big laughs: one where we see the missing children's wood-cut images wrapped
around old fashioned milk bottles, and another with Hansel seeing the candy
house from his fairy tale — "Don't eat the fucking candy," he says grimly.
Everything else is bland fight scenes, photographed so close and
with so many cuts it is hard to tell who's kick-punching who. The potential humor,
like the original story, is purely fairy tale.
