movies: the brothers grimm

If I'd thought about it, I probably would have known better...

I've been looking forward to seeing The Brothers Grimm ever since I heard the two leads were two of my favourite pieces of cinema eye candy, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger... I mean, really, what could be better, Matt, Heath, action fantasy adventure movie... it's all good right?

Normally I'm not someone who is particularly either pro or anti a movie just based on the director... yes, I do have a couple of favourites... but usually I don't care who the director is.

I may have learned my lesson on this movie though... Terry Gilliam... must try and avoid his work in the future...

That's not to say the movie was bad... it was fairly entertaining... it just didn't quite seem to know quite what to do with itself. The first half was very campy, very tongue in cheek, very much not taking itself terribly seriously and there was much chewing of the proverbial scenery (especially in any scenes involving either Peter Stormare or Jonathan Pryce... they essentially had big chunks of scenery stuck in their teeth, sometimes annoyingly so) ... then suddenly, the boys are off to save the day and suddenly everything starts to take itself much more seriously... it just felt a wee bit schizophrenic.

And looking at the various movies Gilliam has directed, they all seem to share that similar bi-polar quality...

The use of the many and varied fairy tales that the real Brothers Grimm were responsible for was actually fairly well done... all the major ones where there... Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, The Princess and the Pea, Snow White, Cinderella, Rumplestiltskin, The Gingerbread Man, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, The Frog Prince... and they're introduced in the movie in such a way that it almost seems natural that the Brothers could have come up with all the various fairy tales from this wide variety of source material.

Then there were the wide variety of fairly questionable accents... Matt and Heath did pretty well overall, although Heath's Australian accent did slide out from under his supposedly English one (while playing a character of German decent, go figure) a couple of times... but topping the questionable list we had the Swedish Peter Stormare doing a completely over the top Italian accent... the Welsh/English Jonathan Pryce doing an incredibly bad French accent... and supporting artists from the Czech Republic doing rural English accents to show that they were simple German peasants (unless of course the English accents were dubbed in later, the children seemed to be more likely to have the accents than the adults)... it all got a bit much in the end...

Then there was leaving the whole (rather questionable in the first place) romantic subplot up in the air at the end of the movie...

yani's rating: 1 Happily Ever After out of 5