A minority report  the enthusiasm seems absurd!

Rating: 3/10 (9 February 2007)

This may be the loneliest I have ever felt as a film columnist I am utterly mystified by the universal acclaim. Is everyone else embracing the heady potential of writer-director Guillermo del Toro's concept so intensely that they are blinded to the soulless reality?
The idea is indeed beguiling. A plucky little girl, emboldened by her belief in fairy tales to magical achievements, finds that her abilities also have an impact in the bloody reality of post-civil-war Spain. It turns out, however, that this idea is mine only. Nobody is actually changed by anything that happens in the movie, not even herself. Her credulity is confirmed without a trace of dissonance.
Ivana Baquero, who plays the child (called Ofelia for no resonant reason) is marvelous, despite being required only to be plucky. The rest of the characters likewise display their one significant characteristic each with whatever strong appealingness, patheticness or loathsomeness the characteristic requires. The clever freedom fighters are uniformly brave loyal truthtellers and expert marksmen. The powerful fascists are thuggish witless dissemblers with toadies who are indistinguishably servile. Hints that their Captain came naturally by his peasant-torturing ways are intriguing, but come to nothing. Likewise nothing comes of parallelism in the death-bringing styles of the pragmatic good guys and the paradigmatic bad guys (e.g. extra shots to the heads of the mortally wounded). A few foreground women do exhibit flickers of human complexity, but we meet only one who has not lost her guts along with her innocence.
Meanwhile the first two otherworldly creatures Ofelia meets do seem interestingly (frighteningly!) ambiguous, but they aren't  they prove to have been cut from the same cardboard duality as the rest. Only once does the otherworld impact the real world, and it occasions the movie's punchiest horror: When a baby is thrown into a fire, the baby is actually a cute gurgling health-bringing root vegetable that only looks like a baby. Nonetheless when we get to watch it writhe and contort and char and scream until it dies, I'm not sure the distinction is important.
So we are left to suffer through two exhaustingly horrible stories before learning that if you are in fact the long-awaited magical incarnation of enchanted-world destiny, you'll be all right at the very end (and for the next three hundred years!, according to a voice-over), and that if you are scrabbling on the godless surface of the earth, most of you will suffer horribly, die young, and be forgotten before you rot, even by the writer-director.
The result is utterly unredemptive (except to the plucky girl, who goes to little-girl heaven). The rest of us  no, sorry, it's just me  must be left to mourn the craftsmanship wasted on sucking viewers into this joyless humorless schizophrenia.