Panned Labyrinth

Rating: Null/10 (21 March 2007)

Equal parts Lewis Carroll, Hieronymus Bosch and the Greatest Skits of Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro's lysergic, Franco-era fantasy will entrance those with a taste for gruesome hocus-pocus and leave others unfulfilled by its hybridised riffing on timeworn themes.
The story concerns a young girl, Ofelia (played with considerable charm by Ivana Baquero), who is taken by her pregnant mother to a Fascist outpost under the command of Sergi López's brutal Captain  the father of our protagonist's unborn half-sibling. Once in her miserable exile, played out against a backdrop of forest insurgencies by leftist guerrillas, Ofelia soon encounters the titular maze, meeting therein a mysterious faun, Pan, who reveals to her three tasks that might lead to her redemption and rebirth as a princess of his realm.
The shadow of Clive Barker hangs brooding over Pan's Labyrinth, which often cranks up the squirm and shock factors in a bid for authentically adult kudos. Del Toro determinedly steers clear of the kind of whimsical escapism virtually patented by Terry Gilliam: for every cutesy fairy, there's a bullet in the head; wherever stardust falls, a bloodied civilian follows suit, grounding the piece in a bedrock of unpleasant reality. This principle of balance works, up to a point. After the second act, it becomes rigidly metronomic.
Subtlety in the way of emotional depth is likewise in short supply, as are broader dramaturgical complexities such as motivational or moral explorations in what is a Manichean fable. The Captain, who comes across like Vito Corleone with a migraine, rams home his nastyboots credentials in a series of heavy-handed attacks against all and sundry. Indeed, all the film's central characters are by-the-numbers Good or Bad, two-dimensionally sketched and for the most part thematically sidelined in favour of what are the real attractions here: the inventively grotesque, Narnia-gone-septic monsters in which del Toro obviously delights.
Moviegoers with a predilection for Hellraiser et al will find much to enjoy here, as will older Jim Henson fans who have not yet had lunch. But, Pan's Labyrinth is ultimately a meretricious exercise in aesthetic showboating. Though it looks undeniably sumptuous, and its set design is pungently evocative, mythologists and militarists alike may find its themes  of trial and redemption, warfare, loyalty and love (in the latter lies real magic, boys and girls)  unpalatably hackneyed. We've simply been through this looking glass, down this rabbit hole, behind this wardrobe, onto this battlefield and into this chamber of horrors before, and no amount of visual panache can disguise this when it hides in plain sight. Perhaps the only thing truly special about the "visionary" del Toro's admittedly handsome mise-en-scène is that he has, in plumping for a magic-realist mish-mash that only partly succeeds in either sense, lucratively overhauled a trite schema, and in so doing moved the risible Blade II down a line on his CV. Pan's Labyrinth, superficially beguiling as it is, is in the end little more than a lovely-ugly Wonderland of face-smashing clichés.