Movie Review - ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’

By Bob Garver

“Snow White and the Hunts­man” would actu­ally serve itself well by dis­tanc­ing itself from the famil­iar story of Snow White. It’s so cheesy these days to do a “dark” ver­sion of a beloved children’s tale. It would be more inter­est­ing to just mar­ket an action movie with an evil queen and lots of sword­play and the audi­ence slowly fig­ures out that it’s sup­posed to be Snow White. We can start piec­ing things together with the ref­er­ences to snow, apples, and a vain vil­lain­ess who asks her magic mir­ror if she’s the fairest of them all. If you only had those clues to go on, imag­ine how much of a deli­cious sur­prise it would be when our heroes get ambushed by mys­te­ri­ous fig­ures and it turns out that the attack­ers are the Seven Dwarfs. Since the movie makes it clear that our hero­ine is indeed Snow White, she and The Hunts­man get ambushed and I’m think­ing, “It has to be the dwarfs. It’s about time they showed up.”

Kris­ten Stew­art stars as Snow White, Chris Hemsworth is The Hunts­man, and Char­l­ize Theron is the evil Queen Ravenna. Theron is such an awe­some scenery chewer that it’s easy to for­get that the movie even has good guys. After the death of Snow White’s kind mother, Ravenna abruptly mar­ries her father the king. She mur­ders him on their wed­ding night and imme­di­ately assumes tyran­ni­cal con­trol of the king­dom and has Snow White locked up in a tower for the next decade.

Ravenna stays young and beau­ti­ful by suck­ing the youth out of impris­oned girls from con­quered king­doms, but the magic mir­ror tells her that Snow White’s beauty will even­tu­ally sur­pass her own. She orders her creepy brother (Sam Spru­ell) to bring her Snow White so she can kill her, but Snow White escapes the per­vert and flees into the creature-laden Dark For­est. All the queen’s men are scared of the for­est, so she has to rely on help from an out­side source: the mis­er­able, back-talking, washed up Hunts­man. It takes the Hunts­man about a sec­ond to real­ize that the queen has nefar­i­ous pur­poses for want­ing him to go after Snow White and decides to save her instead. For Snow White it’s not enough to be saved, she wants to meet up with some old allies and take Ravenna down for good. And it should go with­out say­ing that the dwarfs get involved.

With the excep­tion of the iconic dwarfs (who for the record are por­trayed by taller actors shrunken by spe­cial effects), every­thing mem­o­rable about the film involves Theron as the vil­lain. Among the things she breaks are hearts, souls, her cas­tle, and her king­dom. She can con­jure up weapons made of bro­ken glass at which point her ene­mies have to be really fear­ful of grav­ity. She’s ter­ri­bly beau­ti­ful (espe­cially when she takes a PG-13 nude bath in some youth-giving goo) and one won­ders why the magic mir­ror thinks that Stew­art as Snow White can ever over­take her as fairest in the land. The sim­ple answer is that she gets all oldy-moldy when there aren’t any youth­ful souls around for her to suck out.

“Snow White and the Hunts­man” is a generic action movie with a won­der­ful vil­lain. Nei­ther Stew­art nor Hemsworth really bring any­thing to their char­ac­ters, though it occurs to me that Stewart’s future is prob­a­bly in action movies as opposed to more drippy “Twilight”-style romances. A month from now when peo­ple think of Snow White, they’re still going to think of the Dis­ney ani­mated princess and not this movie’s take on her. Though I have no prob­lem with Char­l­ize Theron now being the per­ma­nent face of the evil queen.

Two and a Half Stars out of Five — “Snow White and the Hunts­man” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of vio­lence and action, and brief sen­su­al­ity. Its run­ning time is 127 minutes.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jun 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.