if you like Guillermo del Toro, you'll probably like it

Rating: 6/10 (20 December 2006)

I for one didn't think it was that great. I was expecting fantasy, not people killing each other.
If you think you are going to see a dark faerie tale, you're not. You're going to see a person's face get beat to a pulp in graphic detail, a severe wound sewing operation in graphic detail, bullet shots to the face in graphic detail - and a lot of people getting shot at point blank range. Of course, all this violence is proported to have some sort of meaning, as in, "see how cruel people are too each other". But to me, the movie came across as, "see how much we think you want to watch people being cruel too each other and then we'll come up with a nice theme about how people are so cruel so that you can feel good about our movie's sadism." Apart from that, I can't say that is was a bad movie, just not something that I care to see. Actually, I went in thinking this was the director of Y Tu Mama & Prisoner of A., but when I found out Guillermo is really the directory of Devil's Backbone and Hellboy, I went, oh yeah - THOSE movies that didn't do anything for me.