Movie Review - ‘Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters’

By Bob Garver

It’s Jan­u­ary, and I know that for three rea­sons. The first is that the cal­en­dar says so. The sec­ond is that it’s freez­ing cold. And the third is that I have to review garbage like “Hansel and Gre­tel: Witch Hunters”. This month is noto­ri­ous for its awful slate of new releases (not to be con­fused with awards sea­son favorites like “Zero Dark Thirty” that open in lim­ited release the pre­vi­ous year and wait until Jan­u­ary to go wide). Stu­dios come down from the hol­i­day rush by releas­ing the absolute worst of their back cat­a­logue that would get creamed against real com­pe­ti­tion. But even when taken with this grain of salt, “Hansel and Gre­tel: Witch Hunters” is still a dread­ful film.

The premise is that Hansel (Jeremy Ren­ner) and Gre­tel (Gemma Arter­ton) got such sat­is­fac­tion out of killing their first witch (she of that infa­mous gin­ger­bread house and fiery fate) that they made it their life’s work to kill the rest of them. Our heroes are sum­moned to a small vil­lage where about a dozen chil­dren have gone miss­ing. They soon dis­cover that a con­gre­ga­tion of witches led by Muriel (Famke Janssen) is in town for a cer­e­mony that will make them imper­vi­ous to fire. Nat­u­rally, the cer­e­mony requires a blood sac­ri­fice, and Gretel’s blood fits the bill nicely. But it’s mostly witch and sleazy human blood that gets spilled over the course of the investigation.

The story seems to take place in 19th-century Ger­many, yet the char­ac­ters use mod­ern­ized, auto­matic weapons. So not only is the film dumb enough to trans­port these weapons to its anti­quated set­ting, but it can’t think of a way to kill its witches with­out cheat­ing and resort­ing to guns. The promise of brain­less vio­lence is one of the film’s sell­ing points, and the guns rob us of some cre­ative 18th-century meth­ods. Also, I kept hop­ing to see some­body impaled with a broken-off candy cane from the gin­ger­bread house and it never happened.

Most of the story takes place in a for­est of unclear dimen­sions, so at any given time it’s impos­si­ble to tell where the char­ac­ters are in rela­tion to each other. The spe­cial effects are ter­ri­ble; the witches aren’t scary and the action sequences make bla­tant use of bad CGI. The script is pep­pered with pro­fan­ity that is maybe sup­posed to be funny but really just proves how des­per­ate the film is for a laugh. As for the actors, the film isn’t going to do any favors for the careers of Gemma Arter­ton or Famke Janssen, but it’s Jeremy Ren­ner who is going to suf­fer the most because of this mess. This time last year, he was a bank­able action star hot off “Mis­sion Impos­si­ble: Ghost Pro­to­col”. He has since gone on to be the lamest Avenger, the face of the botched “Bourne” reboot, and now has this blotch on his per­ma­nent record.

I do believe that there’s poten­tial for a good R-rated “Hansel and Gre­tel” movie. But instead of turn­ing the main char­ac­ters into adults who hunt witches, leave them as chil­dren who get lost. There’s plenty of room for twisted, vio­lent imagery in a straight-up adap­ta­tion of the Broth­ers Grimm tale. Plus you don’t get all those embar­rass­ing unin­ten­tional laughs when a grown man and woman intro­duce them­selves as Hansel and Gre­tel. This response to the trail­ers gave me hope that I might be able to enjoy the film as a sort of com­edy. It was a nice hope while it lasted, but it turns out that “Hansel and Gre­tel: Witch Hunters” isn’t enjoy­able on any level.

One Star out of Five.

“Hansel and Gre­tel: Witch Hunters” is rated R for strong fan­tasy hor­ror vio­lence and gore, brief sexuality/nudity and lan­guage. Its run­ning time is 88 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jan 30 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.