The wheels on the bus go....

Rating: 1/10 (5 March 2008)

I'm not much of a wardrama movie fan, but sometimes a genre film can raise itself through a good or original storyline and or sub story. Labirinto doesn't do this at all. It offers nothing more than a meandering tale about the evil of men (set in the easiest of environments to make it work, namely war), which's obvious message is brought far too straightforward and clunky to make any impact whatsoever. People that spout off this movie being a fairytale should consider watching the movie again with a timer. Perhaps only 7% of this movie deals with what can vaguely be described as a fairytale, although I would rather like to call it fable-imagery. We didn't call Kill Bill a Manga movie either just because it had some Manga scenes in it, now did we.
Although it was beautifully shot and occasional featured some good acting, this movie was rather vapid and over the top in it's depiction of violence at the same time. At no point are you required to think because the movie overexposes everything it tries to touch. The characters are all, note all, two-dimensional which makes it impossible to relate to them. If this movie had been made in Hollywood in the same quality with an English-speaking cast, it wouldn't have survived 4 weeks at the theaters. It was just that year's foreign cinematic darling and the audiences slavishly and ignorantly followed suit. This is one of those cases where the naked emperor didn't even bother to show up.
3/10