Proper nasty witches, warts and all.

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2013)

Really wicked witches have been woefully under-represented in cinema over the years, with only a handful of films genuinely doing the scary old hags justice; Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters sees Norwegian writer/director Tommy Wirkola doing his utmost to raise their profile as movie monsters, offering up more malevolent, wizened, child-eating crones than you can shake a broomstick at.
With his focus clearly on the creation of these nasty witches, and their subsequent destruction by Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton), Wirkola offers only the slightest of plots off which to hang the gory deaths, comic-book fighting, CGI effects, and numerous sneaky shots of Arterton's heaving bosom. Fortunately, for the majority of the time, Wirkola's handling of the action is slick enough to compensate for the lack of story, the weak writing only becoming really noticeable whenever there is a rare lull in pace.
It's lead female star's tightly-corseted cleavage aside, the film's most enjoyable aspect is when it occasionally shifts up a gear to OTT, bats**t crazy violence mode, the most entertaining scenes being Hansel's bonkers battle with Siamese-twin witches and troll Edward's gory head-stomping rampage, both of which have energy and imagination to spare. If this level of enthusiasm for the bizarre and the grotesque had been applied just a little more often, I might even have been declaring a new favourite...