Hansel and Gretel forgot the breadcrumbs...

Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters

It is that time of year again. When all the good movies are out and the studios try to pass off some crappy wannabe movie on an unsuspecting public and hope to make back their original investment. It is the time of the dead movies. Dead movies to me are movies which have star in them but the script, effects, or acting was less than good. In fact, most of the dead movies are literally the worst ideas in the history of cinema.

From this we get movies like The Brothers Grimm, Joyful Noise, One for the Money, Season of the Witch, The Dilemma, and the ever classic From Prada to Nada. It is in the vein of these classics of January film season that the new release Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.

We all know the story of Hansel and Gretel. Two children are taken into the woods and left by their parents. They wander about in search of their home and come across a house made of candy. A smart child would probably be dubious of the effectiveness of frosting as spackle but I digress. The kids enter the house and are besieged upon by a witch who plans to fatten the children up and eat them. Hansel and Gretel eventually outsmart or trick the witch and she is consumed by fire in the very oven she meant to kill the children is. It is one of those stories that if it ended right there people would be OK with that. It has all the great moments... candy house, witch, moral lesson about stranger danger/ too many sweets, cannibalism, and finally innocence defeating evil. Who wants more? Apparently the makers of this movie.

I knew walking into it that it didn’t have a great shot of being a movie that was a fun adventure through the world of fairy tales. It did have Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton, Peter Stormare, and Famke Janssen. A decent cast who with a proper script could have made a quality picture. They went another way. Hansel and Gretel in the years since dispatching of the candy house witch have become the go to people for witch killing. They have weapons (made by their own hands, made for them, the movie never tells) and for some odd reason witches magic does not work on them. So they can fight and defeat the worst of the worst. They also save a few would be witches from the pyre. Now they fight, shoot and take an inordinate amount of punishment (really when someone is hit in the face by a shovel they do not continue with the fight until after they regain consciousness) on there way through killing any witch that crosses their paths. Now they come to a town that has lost 11 kids to witches and as the blood moon comes, the town mayor turns to the witch hunters to find the children and kill the witches.

I’d want to say I thought this was a fresh idea but the Van Helsing of it all really took me out of the picture. From the opening moments when the production houses put up their little teasers, I knew that this movie was tonally in trouble. It started with Paramount and MGM which gave me a flicker of hope. Then came MTV films which as an old man I would attach to a young teenage style of movie. This is what the movie was. Oddly the movie carried an R rating which took away the teen audience. Why they made an R movie really bothered me. There was unnecessary nudity (coming from a guy that means something), an out of time use of modern slang and swearing, and violence that while inventive wasn’t necessary. They easily could have made a PG-13 movie without changing the story and had a better movie that was able to reach the target audience. Instead we are stuck with these odd tonal shifts that puzzled me. 

The last production house, Gary Sanchez Productions made me feel as though the story they told in their production card was more interesting than the story that was gonna come. I’m not even sure what it all meant. I wanted more production card... which says all I really need to say about Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters. It just was. There was not real caring about characters, no backstory (in a movie when the backstory was the premise), good effects that tried to hide the obvious flaws in story and tone. 

I like Jeremy Renner and think he could become the next great action hero. Based on this movie, I am sure he hoped this movie would rot on a shelf. It probably should have but it is January and Paramount Pictures wanted to make back the 60 million dollars they invested in it. So once again the curse of the new year’s movie dead space strikes again. 

Mr. Unhappy sez: Like Hansel, I went diabetic after eating the candy house. After the first scene I would have preferred a diabetic coma.