Review: “The Brothers Grimm"

by
Jennifer Iverson
Film Critic

“The Brothers Grimm,” is a fictional account of the real life authors, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. These are the same brothers who collected folk tales, retooled them and wrote prolifically, creating the captivating yet gruesome Cinderella; Snow White, and lesser-known How Children Played Butcher With Each Other. Presented frantically and without clear definition of what it really wants to be, director Terry Gilliam’s attempts to present a stylish fantasy fall predominantly flat. The convoluted script by Ehren Kruger, who most recently wrote “Skeleton Key,” leaves the high voltage cast stranded in a murky and muddled mess of a storyline that must have sounded better in concept than it actually plays out on the big screen.

The film begins with Will (Matt Damon) and Jacob (Heath Ledger) as two latter day “Ghostbusters,” roaming from town to town across Germany, rigging and then ridding the supposedly haunted villages of witches and curses all of course, for a price. Their buffoon-like con artist approach to life works until they are revealed as frauds by the evil General Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce) who instead of sentencing them to a tortuous death, sends them off into an enchanted forest to retrieve eleven missing girls and battle a 500-year-old Mirror Queen. All of the scenes that follow intersperse hints of characters from recognizable Grimm’s stories, including Little Red Riding Hood and Rupunzel.

Despite their innate screen presence, Damon and Ledger never get the chance to make much out of the one-dimensional characters they play, but one can only imagine how dreadful this picture would have been without them. Pryce is pretty convincing as the creepy and sadistic French general.

For those moviegoers who have actually read any of the works of the Brothers Grimm, the idea that a film would be made about them and that all the money and special effects used have nothing in the least to do with the actual people they were, may be more than a little astonishing. Over the years, the beloved and incredible Grimm tales have been sanitized, Disneyfied, and now with this film sadly, stupefied.