20
Arts & Entertainment
THE SCHOOLCRAFT CONNECTION
February 4, 2013
Fairytales for grown-ups "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" is stupid fun without the fun By Carlos Razo Staff Writer
Is it possible for a movie to be so ludicrous and silly that it transcends what would normally be considered “good,” and transforms into something enjoyable? The nature of art is obviously subjective, but at the end of the day, can’t it be enough for a piece of entertainment to simply… entertain? Is it paramount for every film to be a visceral work of art, or can a movie get away with nothing more than 90 minutes of blood, gore and Gemma Arterton in a leather corset? “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” gives us an answer. Everyone knows the story: Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the woods where they find a house made of candy. Inside they find a witch, she threatens to eat them, they push the witch into an oven, and they live happily ever after… or do they?
According to screenwriter/director Tommy Wirkola, the siblings grow up and use their terrifying experience to become exactly what the title suggests, and that’s pretty much all this movie is interested in saying. When walking into a film like this, certain juvenile presumptions are going to be made. You expect violence – lots of it – and you expect one enormous tongue-in-cheek romp. Hopefully the filmmakers understood that no one would take a project like this seriously, and because of this would fill it with as much over-the-top language, gore and cool gadgets imaginable. In that respect, it is amusing at times and occasionally clever. The plot is thin, derivative and does not contain the smallest ounce of narrative or twist, but connects the dots on the most basic of levels, allowing the action to come and
go as quickly as possible. But even so, all the action is the same. Two people run at each other, knock the weapons out of each other’s hands, fall to the floor, struggle for control and are saved just in time by an offscreen character. You can only show the siblings fighting witches in the woods so many times before you are begging for something new. Some outrageous gore supplies a few laughs, but that alone simply isn’t enough. The two leads lack family chemistry, and beyond the fun of making a silly movie like this, it’s clear neither wanted anything more than a paycheck while uttering some of the occasionally funny one-liners. The cinematography is messy and hard to see, and the poor set-lighting makes it even harder to make sense out of what’s going on. The 3-D effects are exploited, using digitally animated gimmicks such as flying
knives and chunks of witch brain, but bits of guff flying at you won’t likely enhance the monotonous experience. Can a movie be simply viewed as a piece of popcorn entertainment, devoid of any nuance and still be something enjoyable and worth watching? Yes, it can. On a base level, movies are meant to be something worth sitting down and wasting a few hours on, and any artistic merit on top of that just makes the film even better. Sadly, this is not the case with “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters,” which is only occasionally silly, witty and creative enough to be enjoyable. With a little more camp and a little more style, the filmmakers could have had a really fun movie, but instead of dumb fun, we are given something that is just dumb.