Movie Review

The Brothers Grimm

This one is so bad that I barely saw it coming. I wasn't expecting anything great, but I thought it would at least be vaguely watch-able. But the film does not even live up to a low standard: this is one of the worst movies of the year, and this year that's saying an awful lot. To be fair, this would be one of the worst movies of any year, so comparisons really aren't that relevant.

The nonexistent story is just a excuse to pack in a bunch of stuff from the original Grimm fables. We have the Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm (Matt Damon & Heath Ledger) and they are captured by a comically evil French military man, and they are sent to a village on the border of an enchanted forest. They are tasked with solving the mystery of disappearing little girls from the village. They trot around the forest with various characters: we get to see the Big Bad Wolf, Hansel & Gretel, and a chick in a tower with really long hair, as in Rapunzel (or is it Rumplestiltskin?). The Brothers crack the case by discovering the vicious plot of an undead queen; it is up to their highly doubtful magic powers to save the day.

The movie just careens from one scene to another with no sense of coherence or transition. There is no story to hang on to, which leaves one massively cold and adrift. This has every hallmark of a project that was tinkered with by moronic studio suits to the point of redundancy. Why did they hire Gilliam if they were just going to capsize whatever sense of vision he could bring to the table? Not to let Gilliam off the hook: he's handed a movie about the classic imagination-artists, and he turns it into a ridiculous hodgepodge of pseudo-eccentricity and incredibly dumb characters. He attempts to inject his patented style into the film's fabric, and it comes off as a lame and uninspired trick to con his audience into having fun. Moviegoers will be miserable instead.

I dozed off while watching this thing, and that's a rare occurrence for me, even with some of the worst fare. The last movie that I closed my eyes on was Season of the Horse (C-), and that's an art film about farmers from Mongolia! There's just no real reason to stay awake during Grimm; it is so monumentally uninvolving. The only reason I didn't fall asleep was because of the frequent crashing and assorted loud noises which shrieked from the speakers - a failed attempt to generate a tiny bit of excitement out of this childish non-fable. It's a test just to endure any five minutes of this wretched "adventure."

Stay away from this flick even if you think you might enjoy it. It's one of those movies that leaves your mouth agape in disbelief, scratching your head quizzically as you leave the theater thinking, "What the hell did I just watch?" Some people might strive to like it with all their might because they have warm memories of the source material. Some may praise it for its imagination, but I found that quality lacking in a big way; the CGI is pedestrian at best, and we never get that sense of fantasy coming to exuberant life. For a movie with magic as a central element, there is no magic at all.

Scott's Grade: C-

A	15.1%
B	59.2%
C	24.5%
D	1.2%
F	0.0%