Ridiculous romp with squashed heads

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2013)

Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the woods as children by their father, were able to triumph over the witch who trapped them in her house made of candy. Now grown, they make their living hunting and exterminating witches, and they are summoned to a town where a number of children have gone missing.
Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton have fun playing witch hunters who, quite frankly, are complete rubbish, constantly getting their *rses handed to them by a succession of witches throughout the film. It is only when they unleash a host of preposterous weapons of mass destruction (I do love me a mediaeval machine gun, not to mention a taser which doubles as a defibrillator!) that the tide finally turns.
This film tries to go for the straight-faced romp vibe of Van Helsing, but doesn't quite make it, and I'm not sure why. It might be because it is very strong – there is some extremely graphic violence here (heads exploding, people being ripped apart etc.) together with some very ripe language, making this (in my view) an unnecessarily extreme experience, thus reducing the size of its audience. Example: there comes a point when one of the siblings says, "You've got to be f***ing kidding me!" in circumstances which make the line funny: several minutes later the other sibling says exactly the same thing, and the repeat is doubly funny. But the line would have been just as funny, both times, without the profanity – I felt a lot of the extremeness was put there because the filmmakers felt it ought to be there, rather than because it added anything.
The production values are high, but something was missing and I'm not sure what it was.
There were time when things came at you, but the 3D was mostly forgettable.