Even with a titular addendum like “Witch Hunters” and an R rating, one has trouble expecting anything shocking from a movie about the children’s fable “Hansel and Gretel.” Creepy? Perhaps. Gruesome? Never.
Wrong.
Simply put, filmmaker Tommy Wirkola’s (“Kill Buljo,” “Dead Snow”) “Hansel and Gretel” is a gleeful gore-fest. Limbs are shredded, blood sprays, guts splatter and heads are mashed, sliced off, squashed and blown away. It is completely over the top, with each grisly death eliciting a little chortle or an “ugh!” But honestly, it’s totally entertaining, and it’s ghastly good fun.
After a chilling expository scene taken almost directly from the fable itself — candy house and all — an eerie abode with giant teeth around the doorway where the children burn a witch in her own oven), the audience is filled in on the siblings’ checkered witch-hunting career through a series of newspaper clippings and woodcut scenes that rush past during the opening credits. The movie catches up with the two as adults, now infamous bounty hunters called to investigate the disappearances of several children in the German town of Augsburg.
Hansel (Jeremy Renner channeling a medieval Aaron Cross) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton, who appears to have cut-and-pasted her role from “Clash of the Titans”) arrive just in time to prevent the overzealous and impressively mustachioed Sheriff Berringer (Peter Stormare) from executing Mina (Pihla Viitala), a young woman falsely accused of witchcraft. From there, the pair embarks on a perilous hunt for the grand witch Muriel (Famke Janssen), battling a multitude of witches and a troll with the help of the bumbling but dedicated Ben (Thomas Mann) and a literal cartload of artillery (ranging from crossbows to Gatling guns). The action is frenetic, rarely lets up and enough horror is thrown in to keep it from devolving into something out of the “Matrix,” although the plot is predictable to the extreme and more than a little derivative of its predecessors (“The Brothers Grimm,” “Sleepy Hollow,” etc.). The 3-D, while not gimmicky by any means, adds little to the proceedings save for depth perception, and no piece of scenery besides the candy house is particularly memorable (dark woods and decrepit barns wear thin about 30 minutes in).
The two hunters are your run-of-the-mill badass team: Hansel is a brawler who keeps to himself (he refuses help, speaks tersely, et al.), while Gretel is strong-willed and sexy (she beats the hell out of uppity peasant men while still resembling some sort of Hot Topic model). Neither character is particularly innovative or three-dimensional, although Hansel has a daily insulin injection he must take, a result of a time when a witch made him eat too much candy. The dialogue is certainly a low point.
Little attention was given to the script, save for communicating to the audience how much ass is about to be kicked, and hokey one-liners abound. A proliferation of anachronistic potty mouth does not help in this department, and much of the film’s limp-wristed attempts at humor rely solely on Jeremy Renner and his use of the word “fuck” (“Don’t eat the fuckin’ candy!,” upon revisiting the sugary cottage is a gem, for sure). Where “Hansel and Gretel” falls short on good guys, however, its villains take the cake. The bulk of the witches are horrifyingly orc-ish and predatory, scuttling about and shrieking demonically, and the variety in their build and appearance is both engrossing and hair-raising. No matter how many bad guys the siblings eradicate, the next encounter always adds something fresh and exciting.
Ultimately, “Hansel and Gretel” is pretty predictable and more than a little cheesy — don’t expect it to defy the conventions of action flicks or boldly go where no movie has gone before. However, there’s an appreciable amount of ghoulish fun to be had, and viewers in the mood for a straightforward shoot-em-up will find themselves reasonably entertained. (C)
