Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

Rating: 3/10 (6 August 2015)

Well, good ole Hollywood takes another Grimm dark fairy tale and loads with bloated CGI effects and action set pieces. Want to see Hansel and Gretel (Jeremy Renner and Gemmer Arterton) using heavy artillery to massacre witches? Here is the perfect entertainment for you. Their parents taken from them violently as a children thanks to those evil witches (headed by a particularly loathsome but still quite attractive Famke Janssen, having too much fun when her pretty face is featured; but most of the time it's a CGI hideous visage), Hansel and Gretel have grown into hunters packing a lot of heat (the kind of machine guns, crossbows, and unfolding shotguns modified to look medieval even if they clash with the period this film is set). Hansel has a "condition" thanks to a witch's curse through a "candy poison" that requires him to inject a serum to keep him well (if he doesn't, he dies) when a timer on his arm goes off. Meanwhile, a white witch falls head over heels for Hansel, a giant troll defends and protects Gretel when she needs it the most, and Hansel and Gretel's "biggest fan" (he has followed their work, and his hero worship is enthusiastic, to say the least) ends up helping them take down their main nemesis as she is riding her broom furiously away from them through the woods (she's quite a driver, missing the branches and trees throughout). There's even a Gatling gun that makes an appearance, with the white witch just firing away at Hansel's urging, ruining a major blood moon Sabbath ritual with Gretel meant to lose her heart to the evil witches, with little chained kids also expected to be sacrificed as well. You even get Matrix stylized "freeze action" and lots of CGI bloodshed (the troll wipes out a very nasty group of villagers pummeling Gretel, using its massive fists as bludgeoning tools and a large tree as a weapon also). When witches aren't being blown away, trees endure Predator like destruction. The woods are not safe as long as the hunters and their prey are loose. Thanks to CGI, the witches are all kinds of ugly, their faces and eyes grotesque, as foul as their behavior. I'm surprised the talent involved in this rather disposable medieval action flick that really does take a giant crap on the childhood story written particularly to give us the chills. All the gunplay and martial arts (yes, the witches seem to possess the fighting skills of Jason Bourne) really are absurd. All the money wasted on this; sheesh.