This review contains spoilers, but let's face it, you won't be watching it for the plot.

Rating: 2/10 (13 September 2017)

Tommy Wirkola's bizarre fantasy remake of Grimms' Hansel and Gretel story has a less than encouraging start. By minute three it's clear Wirkola has drawn his audience into a dark fantasy universe, though which one is unclear. Hansel and Gretel's entrance into the candy cottage feels too much like falling down the rabbit hole, while the witch resembles a goblin that could have come straight out of The Lord of the Rings, making clicking noises curiously similar to that of Alien's monster.
Admittedly, the filmmakers do try to hook us with a dramatisation of the canonical witch's fatal moment. For our heroes Hansel and Gretel (played as adults by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton respectively) the fiery climax of Grimms' story was simply the beginning of Wirkola's. Brother and sister, now famous witch hunters, must thwart a cult of witches in their plan to become resistant to fire. But you don't watch movies like this for the plot, so I won't harp on about those kinds of howlers.
Except there's little to praise elsewhere. It's predictably predictable, boringly shot, with some shameful exposition and cartoonish conflict. The score is uninspired - its similarity to rock music is particularly grating. Convincing and at times rather delightful seventeenth century sets are ruined by embarrassing Americanisms that make the rare attempts at a Germanic accent absurd: "Set her a$$ on fire", "that Gretel b*tch", and (my personal favourite), "f*ckin' hillbillies!". It's lazy dialogue at its extreme; Wirkola, director and writer, substitutes adding real meaning with a swear word or two. Hansel's lover bleeds in his arms, and all the dying beauty can say is, "Kill the f*cking b*tch."
Lazy writing, lazy characters. Renner, brilliant though he is, can't do anything with his role; Hansel is only interested in hunting women and, well, shagging them, and solves all his problems by using people as punching bags. The audience is taunted with the possibility of a powerful female lead, one of whose first acts is to headbutt the sheriff right in the face. It's pleasantly surprising that the director doesn't give all the fighting to the action-savvy, Bourne and Hawkeye star. However, the script soon degenerates into making good use of Arterton's boobs in a painfully unnecessary cleavage-cleaning exchange.
The duo's gender roles work no better together. Hansel is out getting laid, sadly off screen, while Gretel is the strong yet subdued damsel in distress who's almost raped by a second-tier villain. Gretel ends up being saved throughout: by Hansel, by the teenage fanboy who touched her boobs, even by a deus ex machina troll and then, imaginatively, by the troll again.
Secondary characters that at set-up seemed important are dispensed with in slapstick fashion - a brave Game of Thrones tactic, you might think, but it only highlights how superfluous these characters were from the get-go, born to end up as a screenplay mess brushed under the carpet midway through the film.
Well, maybe you won't watch it for the characters. "Dark fantasy action horror comedy," reads the wiki page, without a single comma to conceal its ambitious and confusing genre. With ill-timed jokes and botched tension, comedy and horror are off the table, but you may as well see it for the action, right?
Wrong. Even primarily as a mindless, one-time action movie Hansel and Gretel fails. The fight scenes are occasionally inventive, always predictable, and mostly comprised of middle aged, costumed Halloweeners tumbling in roly-polies on the floor. The special effects are unbelievable at best, comedic at worst. Cranberry juice blood is squirted all over set as an entire man explodes like a balloon, a meal of children soup is served, and a henchman is dismembered and decapitated all in the same move. With its archetypal characters and cloying one-liners butting in on all the cheap 15-rated gore, the film straddles the awkward position between child's fairy tale and teenage action flick, and a bad one at that.
It would be harsh to say the film wasn't made entirely without thought, though. A shiny red apple alludes to Snow White, the "not too cold, not too hot" porridge is a cameo of Goldilocks, yet quite what purpose these references serve is more unclear. The anachronisms of this early modern landscape are baffling too. The hunters' weapons would look more at home in The Avengers - Renner's leather get-up is laughably reminiscent, but don't worry, Arterton sports the high tech crossbow to make it less obvious. But when Hansel rolls into the wood-and-hut village with his machine gun, I lost it.
Sadly the film escalates not in meaning or intensity but in kills-per-second, with a kind of video game attitude that clings to the mantra 'gore is more'. Gretel's conspicuously absent from most of the violent denouement, since she is finishing up the only meaningful plot of the movie: the romance between her and her deus ex machina troll (perhaps an intelligent nod to Beauty and the Beast, but the debate's still out).
When it becomes more fun to write about a film's blunders than it is to watch the film itself, it should probably be consigned to the 'never speak of again' pile of high budget movies with high class actors that just couldn't make the effort. Still, it's not beyond me that the film turned some $200 million profit, with Snow White and the Huntsman pulling more or less the same the previous year. Perhaps there is something compelling about realising our fairy tales in film, though hopefully Hansel and Gretel is the one-too-many that makes us rethink fantasy cinema. Who knows, it might just be worth it for that topless scene of Renner, but there's always a GIF or two from Bourne to make up for that.