An orgy of violence that's loud, dull and incoherent

Rating: 4/10 (25 January 2013)

HANSEL & Gretel: Witch Hunters is on the surface a rip-off of The Expendables 2. The dialogue is just functional, risible and crude, and the action -- not to mention the abundance of blood splatter, and crushed and decapitated heads -- dominates most of the film.
The film certainly doesn't mince its action; in fact, it'll make director Quentin Tarantino blush.
Norwegian writer-director Tommy Wirkola, in his English-language debut, uses the Brothers Grimm's tale of child abandonment as a springboard to display his aptitude with medieval fantasy, tight leather clothes, face-changing witches and an arsenal of heavy weapons for the most enlightened of bounty hunters.
Hansel (Renner) and Gretel (Arterton) dig deep into their souls to get rid of witches.Beneath the river of blood that permeates this film, however, lies the simple fact that two orphaned siblings are on a quest to find out what had become of their parents and why they were abandoned, in short, a search for their identities.
Unfortunately, to get to that point, viewers will have to sit through an avalanche of violence. As one sibling says: "Unleash hell."
The film opens with Hansel and Gretel being carted into the woods by their father. He never comes back. Brother and sister walk into a home made of cake and dispose of the witch in it, thanks to their immunity from spells.
Fifteen years later, diabetic Hansel (Jeremy Renner of The Avengers, The Bourne Legacy) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton of Quantum of Solace) are witch hunters.
The mayor of the small German town of Augsburg (in a nod to the tale's German roots) hires them to kill witches who have been abducting children for a sacrificial ceremony.
For a while, it's fun to see the male and female siblings working together to eliminate witches.
Both have equal strength and are well-equipped to deal with any event that arises, especially as they have weapons that emit arrows. That fun quickly disappears as their witch hunts involve only a huge amount of carnage.
Hansel says: "Killing innocent women won't bring back the missing children." He'll get to skinny dip with pretty Mina (Pihla Viitala), initially wrongfully accused of being a witch.
Mina later gets to spray bullets with a machine gun in a scene similar to that in The Last Stand.
Gretel finds an unlikely romance with a troll, Edward (Derek Mears), who's the Beast to her Beauty. Edward crushes victims, especially their heads, as if they were ants.
The film, of course, sets its mind and path on beating viewers into submission.
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