When, therefore, I found it nestled in the Channel 5 listings last night, I sort of felt obliged to take a look. I might not always be nice, after all, but I do always try to be fair. In the interests of complete fairness, in fact, I do have to say that the thought of it didn't inspire the same vague feelings of resignation and dread within me that I got before watching Her - sure, it looked like a very bad film indeed, but it did at least look like a very bad film with enough explosions and one-liners to keep me nicely distracted.
Hansel & Gretel... is one of the last of that wave of allegedly grown-up fairytale adaptations that the big studios seemed to think we wanted a couple of years ago - there was a Red Riding Hood, and Snow White and the Hunter, and Mirror, Mirror, bits of which I actually saw but am slowly trying to repress. I'm not sure why we got all these at once; I suspect that a lot of high-ups had started to see young adult literature as a guaranteed cash cow, and wanted something where they wouldn't need to pay both the screenwriter and the author of the original material.
Hansel & Gretel... is at least an attempt to do something new with one of the classic fairy tales, summarising the original in the prologue and using it for a jumping-off point. The main body of the film takes place some years later, when Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) are all grown up but still thirsty for gruesome revenge on every witch they encounter. Armed with an impressive array of weaponry and, in Hansel's case, his diabetic medicine, they decide to get rid of one particularly senior witch before a rare lunar event enables her to create a potion that will render her invulnerable to fire.
The good
This one wasn't half as bad as I feared it might be. In retrospect, it's not surprising - Arterton is one of the most charismatic actresses working today, and while I've never been Renner's biggest fan, his work in American Hustle was a miracle of understated likeability. Together, they make for a charming pair of heroes, with her beauty tempered by Gretel's endless pragmatism and him providing a lugubrious, hangdog charm that enables him to deliver some pretty dreadful dialogue in a way that hits just the right note of self-awareness. These are finely-judged performances, making the most of what cannot have been easy material to work with.As for the rest? It looks okay, I suppose; I suppose the word would probably be serviceable. The sets are okay, the effects are fine for what they are, and if it all looks as though it was pulled together on a shoestring budget, you have to ask yourself whether you'd really want somebody spending hundreds of millions on a concept like this.
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