Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

            Movie theaters down here smell like sweat, popcorn and seat cushion farts.

            On to the review!

            This weekend I was going to shoot for two movies that had the potential to be terrible:  Hanseland Gretel: Witch Hunters and Movie43.  After watching the first, I'm not sure I have the energy to be angered by the second.

            Ostensibly, Hansel and Gretel shows what happened after the Grimm's Fairy Tale ended.  Yeah, they killed the witch by tossing her in the oven.  But then what?

            According to the title, they go on to become witch hunters.  All grown up, they now travel the land and eradicate witches wherever they find them.  Cool, premise, right?  Yes but they somehow managed to turn it into an 88 minute snoozefest.

            Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is an issue of a script so bad, no actor can make it better.  Jeremy Renner is supposed to play Hansel as dim-witted, gruff, and fight-happy.  Yet for some reason, he gives such a terrible performance that I'm convinced he's just slumming it here and trying to keep in shape for the next Avengers movie.  His sister, Gretel, is played by Gemma Arterton and this poor girl gets absolutely no help from anyone.  Here's how I think her character was fleshed out:

            "Hey guys, how do we show the audience that's she's a tough chick?"

            "Oh, I know!  Let's make her swear a lot and always throw the first punch!"

            "Cool, cool.  But still, she's a chick, so when it comes down to it, we're going to strip her of all her toughness and pride and make her a wussy woman, right?"

            "Oh yeah, of course!"

            Seriously, fuck this script.  Even the wonderfully entertaining Fammke Janssen, playing Muriel, the baddest wicked witch in all the land, couldn't do anything with her one-dimensional character.  Sure, there are other people in this movie, but fuck 'em.  Two years from now they'll all swear that they were forced to do this movie at gunpoint.

            Is there a plot?  Yeah, and there's a love interest and a plot twist and some action and blah blah blah.  You can predict everything roughly 10-30 minutes before it happens. 

            But what about the fight scenes?  Surely an action 3D movie has great fight scenes, right?

           

            WRONG.

            The fight scenes are terrible because they're all the same.  Every single fucking fight is scripted exactly like the last one.  Gretel fires her bow and misses, Hansel fires his gun and misses.  They scrap with a witch.  The witch kicks their ass but then runs away.  Gretel fires her bow again and misses.  Hansel chases after them.  Something stupid happens and the witch loses because of bad luck. 

            Every.  Damn.  Time.

            So by all means, go see this movie if you have money to burn or are so hard up for sex that you're willing to pay $8-15 to see women run around in leather pants.  Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is just another crappy Van Helsing that somehow is even worse than Van Helsing, and I hated the shit out of that movie.