Fun to watch, but a huge waste of potential

Rating: 6/10 (18 August 2013)

Hansel And Gretel has great potential but suffers from bland and clumsy direction. If the director had been top quality, this could have been a surprise hit and one of the top action movies of the year. Hansel and Gretel is full of fresh ideas and irreverently injects the old tale we all know with blood, comedy and sex. Now we're left with a half-baked fusion of genres that doesn't quite cut it.
Sometimes the timing is so bad that the movie almost stops in its tracks. Due to poor shot selection many of the good action scenes are less cool and thrilling.
E.g., the cool weapons do not get the screen time and exposure they deserve. Scenes introducing some of the weapons seem to have been cut. So, surprisingly, you may not see enough of the weapon to totally appreciate what it can do. This may seem trivial, but I'd say the weapons account for about one third of the charm of the movie.
The same goes for the characters, which are often thrown into a scene that doesn't properly connect to the previous one.
The main roles are well cast, which makes up for some of the aforementioned waste of potential. I found Gemma Arterton to be fresh, sexy and fun to watch. Renner is not as good (for which we may also blame the director), but he handles the combination of language, comedy and action well. The entire cast is A movie material and is doing a more than decent job.
If you don't mind a new take on fantasy and fairy tale, you'll have fun.