Hansel & Gretel Review
This film puts the “Gret” in “I regret watching it”.
I think this movie is a good opportunity to talk about a commodity in films knows as “suspension of disbelief”. Suspension of disbelief is needed to a lesser or greater extent in all films, if only because you know the people are all acting and not really getting killed, or falling in love, or shooting webs out of their wrists. This is why actual real footage of accidents or romance is so much more impactful than the greatest scenes ever created.
(movie image courtesy of the Movie T Shirt category)
The problem is there is only so much suspension of disbelief available in the universe. Actively disbelieving something you know to be true (like aliens don’t really burst from the chest of humans) is a conscious decision you as the viewer opt to make, and like all conscious efforts it requires work. The more you have to suspend your disbelief the harder your brain is working, thus making the viewing experience more tiring.
There are ways of extending the amount of disbelief an audience will stomach. A great story, interesting characters, excellent special effects, or even something we really want to believe is true (like super heroes actually have super powers that work) will allow you to disbelieve more than you normally would. However, when you hear people talking about a story or character being really “real” what they are really saying is these things are easier to watch and enjoy because their brains don’t have to work so hard.
Unfortunately, Hansel & Gretel have none of the disbelief extending elements. The story is ass, the characters actually add to the disbelief by dressing like they were from 17th century Bavaria but sounding like they just got back from the Galleria, the special effects were nothing of note, and the Brothers Grimm story of Hansel and Gretel is not so beloved by anyone in Western Culture that we would want to believe that they could grow up to be witch killing super ninjas. Then, in what can only be some kind of evil science experiment to see how much disbelief it takes to break all the brains in a movie theater the need for disbelief gets ramped up to 11(000) by showing us some of the dopiest old school super technology ever. Ever wonder why the didn’t have monofiliment wire, miniguns, machinegun crossbows that don’t need ammo, beehive rounds, pump action shotguns, and insulin in the 17th century? That’s because it was all being used by Hansel and Gretel to kill witches, of course.
This weird super technology was remarkably similar to the idiotic contraptions from the epically bad the Three Musketeers. In fact, they were so similar that I decided it couldn’t be a coincidence and sure enough after a little digging I found that Stefen Kolbe was the prop maker for both films. He must have some kind of hypnotic super power over film directors because somehow he gets them to give him a green light to cook up anything he feels like making and put them in the films. The whole film looks like a prop makers ego trip and self gratification project.
The sad part is like I said in my review for the Three Musketeers all this dumb non-existent technology actually adds nothing to the movie and instead drags it down like an anchor. This film could have been decent if they had gotten rid of all this and the ninja super powers and just had Hansel and Gretel hunting witches using the technology of the period. Perhaps they had a team of henchmen who died like red shirts and a priest to back them up (if you have ever read the book Vampire$ by John Steakley you can imagine what this would look like. Don’t see the movie) and can only kill a witch with the blood of a half dozen guys killed in the effort.
How much more engaging would the characters be if we could believe that they were seriously taking their lives into their hands every time they went against a witch? In this film Hansel and Gretel almost always act like fighting witches is kind of easy. Even when they were in a hard fight they never had a moment of fear or real emotion. Remember the movie Aliens when all the super confident Colonial Marines got killed early on and from that moment on the entire cast was terrified because even a single alien could kill them? Think about how much more you identified with Ripley. Nothing bleeds tension from a film like having the protagonists act like killing their enemies is more an inconvenience than anything else.
Sigh. The story. Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their parents in the woods for no apparent reason as children. They come to a witches house made of candy and she tries to eat them. They push her into an oven and grow up to be the worlds greatest witch hunters (Jeremy Renner-the Avengers, Hurt Locker, the Bourne Legacy and Gemma Arterton-Clash of the Titans, Quantum of Solace, Prince of Persia). Fast forward an ill defined number of years and they are hired by the mayor of a local village to find a bunch of missing children. They stop the sheriff from burning to death a super hot red head (who later shows us some bare ass. I hope my best friend is reading this. He loves red heads. Pihla Viitala-Tears of Helsinki, Must Have Been Love, Red Sky) as a witch. They go witch hunting but the head witch (Famke Janssen-Phoenix from the X-Men series, Taken 2, Down the Shore) has some secret plan to make witches immune to fire, thus making them immortal (can someone who saw this explain how this was a good plan? She seemed to think that burning was the only thing that witches were vulnerable too, but most of the witches in this film were either shot, dismembered, or decapitated). Some other guys get sent out into the forest by the sheriff and meet a gruesome end.
Ugh. Recounting this feels like trying to run a length of iron rebar through a hand crank meat grinder. The two find their old house and start to piece together the mystery of why their parents abandoned them in the woods Scooby Doo-style, but just when the story might have had some kind of interesting plot elements the head witch shows up and tells them in exacting details what happened to their parents like she was reading the script Cliff notes. They get their asses beat on and Gretel gets captured. Hansel finds an arsenal of weapons that have no business existing on the other side of 1992 and with the help of the super hot red head (turns out she actually was a witch, but a good one) and some local kid turn the witch ceremony into a comical gun fight.
The stars. A little nudity (very little, but what there was was of extremely high quality). One star. Gretel, the head witch, and the red head were all very easy on the eyes. One star. Total: two stars.
The black holes. The propmaker obviously wanted to be working on Star Trek, not this garbage. Also I’m pretty sure I spotted a zipper on Hansel’s off the rack leather Harley jacket. Two black holes. The story was about as dumb as possible. One black hole. Both Hansel and Gretel looked like they were bored through most of this film, pretty much killing the slightest amount of tension and giving us no reason to really give a damn. Two black holes. The action was laughable, but not in a it’s-fun-to-laugh-at-dumb-action sort of way. One black hole. It’s weird for me to ask for this given how I bitched about it in the Last Stand but this film really could have used a fish-out-of-water comic relief to help off set all the stupidity. All the jokes were delivered by Hansel and Gretel in the same bored affect that they delivered everything else. One black hole. I’m running out of funny predicable things to compare predictable movies to so I will just say this film was very predicable. One black hole. This movie pretty clearly ripped of the speeder bike scene from the Return of the Jedi. One black hole. Finally, two black holes for missing some decent opportunities and spending 88 minutes insulting my intelligence. Total: eleven black holes.
A grand total of nine black holes. How bad is it really? Well, it didn’t feel like this movie was causing me actual pain, and I did like most of the actresses in it. If this film had been done as a cartoon (manga) it might have been decent. I’d say if you were home sick with something that caused you to frequently run to bathroom and expel things from one end or the other this film would keep you from being totally bored. You could miss segments without losing out on the quality of the story. Overall I think this movie just got lazy. Maybe it started as a decent idea and had something of a budget but after a while the producers just figured “F it”. Date movie? Sure, if you are trying to get her to dump you to spare yourself the pain of dumping her. Bathroom break? Feel free at pretty much anytime you like (including the climactic final battle) but if you want a specific time I’d say the scene right after Gretel is rescued by Edward the Troll is an opportune moment.
Thanks for reading. Lots of new stuff out recently, so I will try to see something cool in the next day or two. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Post comments on this movie or my review at the bottom of this article (or click here if you don’t see a comment section). Off topic questions and suggestions can be sent to [email protected]. Have a great day.
Dave
