There are four Hansel and Gretel movies being released this year. I don't understand why Hollywood does this kind of thing. A friend once told me that his hypothesis was that a writer shops his script around to different studios looking for a buyer, and the ones that pass on it still like the general concept but none of the specifics, so they write up something similar and hope to capitalize on the other studio's advertising to get customers.
This is the one with Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as the title characters, and they fight witches. It's a pretty substantial perversion of the original story, but you have to go somewhere with it, don't you? Anyway, they go from town to town killing bad things, and this time they are going up against Famke Janssen as a witch. You may remember Famke from her role as Dark Phoenix (Jean Grey) in the first three X-Men movies.
The whole feel of the movie reminds me of when Hugh Jackman played Van Helsing in the movie of the same name. It's the same fictional timeframe with the same technical limitations, and those limitations seem to be ignored by the star characters who have things like giant fully-auto shotguns and fully-auto crossbows (let's not forget the knight's best friend - a belt-fed machine gun). Here's the thing, though: the special effects on the creatures that are supposed to be a lot larger than a human (in this case, a troll) are actually worse than the movie that was made in 2004. I don't get that.
Well, at least we won't have to worry about a love story, right? I mean, they are brother and sister, and they have been bouncing from town to town since they were eight, so the odds of both of them finding love interests in the same town on the same night are astronomical. I'm SURE that won't happen.
I have seen some of the other Hansel and Gretels, and they were so bad that I didn't bother giving them a review here. This one is at least okay as a popcorn movie with little thinking.
Camerawork was good.
Direction was fairly good.
Editing was okay.
Acting was okay.
Story was predictable.
Dialogue was pretty canned.
1.5/5