Wasted opportunity

Rating: 5/10 (21 October 2014)

This movie could have been a fun, crazy, humorous, lighthearted, silly movie and during moments it is that. It's for instance got a reference to The matrix and when you see witches riding their brooms through the forest it reminds me an awful lot of the famous scene in Return of the Jedi where the storm troopers are racing through the forest in a similar way. It's got exciting chase scenes of which one has a really cool moment where Hansel runs over a tree trunk in a really cool stunt. It's all silly and fun and it stays away from being too serious.
But it also has a scene where a witch forces a boy to shoot his mother in the stomach with a shotgun in front of his little sister; it's not fun. And that's what I feel the problem is with this movie; when it's dark, it's too dark and when it's serious, it's too serious. In other scenes the violence gets too grisly and nasty where characters are punched with brass knuckles and they get shot in the face... It's like it tries to be two different types of movies at once.
The production design is no less than great. It's shot well and the cast performs just fine. Its director though should have made better decisions in terms of what direction he wanted to take it all. He should have had a clearer vision as now the film is incongruous resulting in a movie which is strange in a bad way.
Which is too bad as I would have enjoyed the properly worked out lighthearted version of this very much indeed. I might even go so far as to say that that might have had the potential to be a classic.