Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters "Whatever you do, don't eat the fucking candy."
Ever since Tim Burton's 2010 colossal billion dollar hit "Alice In Wonderland" studios have been seizing the rights to famous fairy tales and adapting them for the big screen. None of which have been anywhere near as financially successful. Snow White & The Huntsmen was a moderate success with $400,000,000 off a bloated $170,000,000 budget, Jack The Giant Slayer is set to bomb at the box office according to tracking, Hansel & Gretel is a very moderate success making $160,000,000 off a medium budget of $50,000,000. Red Riding Hood & Beastly were both huge financial failures. When will Hollywood take the hint and see that Alice In Wonderland was a rarity?
Hansel & Gretel is poorly cast, it was delayed 10 months to see if Jeremy Renner would become an A-List star from The Avengers & The Bourne Legacy & his on screen sister Gemma Arterton has a strong English accent for the entire film whilst Jeremy sported his Californian accent, figure that? Famke Janssen as the head evil witch didn't really bring the venom and sadistic tone as she did when she was the villain in "James Bond Goldeneye" she is still absolutely gorgeous but she looked bored and even admitted that she took the role to pay her mortgage off. The action sequences are dull, everyone constantly does the action roll to dodge flying objects or the "Neo Dodging Bullets Matrix Move" nothing is original. The weapons look like plastic, the music doesn't elevate the intensity it's just repetitive monotonous action.
However the make-up is extraordinary, when the witches are in full swing they are rotting, ugly creatures. And I silently applauded the production team for using physical prosthetic's for the troll "Edward" he wasn't a CGI character he was a man in a suit & he looked fantastically genuine, in fact the trolls action sequence was the most exciting sequence in the film. The time and effort that went into his suit must be appreciated. It's a shame our human leads just didn't have the chemistry to keep this film glued together. It's not a horrible film, but it's far from good, you could do a lot worse. From a technical standpoint it does stand out with physical sets, very little green screen, a lot of gorgeous makeup and prosthetic's, real explosions and trees splintering and buildings actually on fire. The script and casting is where it truly lacks. Some of the line delivery is cringe worthy and the script itself employ's the use of of swearing for the sake of swearing. "Let's say fuck and show some tits to make this an R rated film". I'm not against censorship at all, and I would never encourage censorship but don't use porny shots of women to try and get young boys into the cinema because then you're just selling sex instead of your adapted fairy tale. If you can see it with friends by all means you may enjoy it, just keep expectations really really low. I would pay to see a sequel just to watch the troll in action. 2/5
No comments:
Post a Comment