Apparently it has a bit of a cult status.......

Rating: 3/10 (26 December 2015)

Fairy tales are never usually this gory and yet also so sickly to look at design wise, it looks like an outdoor set made of well not very nice designs. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is a fantasy horror movie directed and written by Norwegian Tommy Wirkola who is probably before this best known for Zombie film "Dead Snow" but really doesn't do too much at all to make this original, well done or even that fun. I'm sure some people have watched this and felt it to be not serious, just a little escapism, which is fine of course but I just felt personally it was not well written, not very well directed and it just felt too much of a bad movie to be even okay.
Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton lead the cast as the two sibling witch hunters whose experience in the beginning of the film leads them to just want to destroy all witches. They play their roles well but to be fair do nothing to save them from being generic characters in a pretty basic story film, It's not really the case with this that the acting hurts it. Oh but wait, maybe it is the acting (not the main two cast members) because some of those witches, I could not stand it, it seriously felt like acting done in some kind of over the top film that even this movie doesn't feel like. I'm not quite sure why Famke Janssen appears in this movie, it is really not her best role to be fair and I just couldn't bare what goes on with her character for much longer in this.
Hey I mean this movie is really neither horrific nor reaching the heights of being just an average old film, it's just bad but not in a way where it feels unwatchable. The film tries to weave itself the nicest of crazy stories and does honestly try with the stunts and such, but in the end it just feels too rushed and just not well made enough. As for the violence involved well for me it is used for comedic effect of course, the movie apparently doesn't take itself seriously when blatantly (or by accident) it does. Wirkola creates something that is not quite a gore-fest but leaves a bloody mess at certain times; this one isn't exactly for the kids to be honest. I almost forgot, the script, Wirkola's writing creates this kind of comedic world where I'm supposed to laugh at every f-word the characters use, but seriously the script is not that great and the actual story that Wirkola creates is nothing short of predictable.
So really Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is a film that should really have been OK, if it had anything original to say that is. It took a bit of a mauling from the critics when it first appeared but since then has gained a cult following, I even watched this thinking "Maybe I will kind of like this", I didn't as you can see. It has the right feel to it, even the start of the film I thought to myself maybe this will be some good old fun and 88 minutes where I can experience some decent fighting and a story to boot but really it squanders that opportunity towards its ending where it just doesn't even try and yet again it looks, well yet again not very nice.