Largely joyless update of the fairy tale classic

Rating: 4/10 (4 July 2013)

"Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters" starts off with a fairly clever premise, but it never comes up with anything particularly interesting to do with it. It would appear that, since stuffing their witch captor into her own oven, the precocious youngsters have grown up to be renowned, Medieval bad-asses, hired by a village to investigate the mysterious disappearances of a number of its children.
As the title characters, Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton do what they can with woefully underwritten roles, but the movie itself quickly degenerates into a succession of redundant action and fight sequences (inexplicably, with modern firepower) that fail to excite either the imagination or the pulse and that ultimately go nowhere. And the ending feels way too much like the start of a franchise. Well, as they say, forewarned is forearmed.