Over the past few years it’s become the “in thing” to revisit old fairy tale stories and give them a gritty contemporary edge. I would almost call it the anti-Disney approach, if the House of Mouse wasn’t responsible for one of the better iterations of the genre with their series Once Upon a Time. Consider Grimm, Red Riding Hood, and last year’s dueling Snow White retellings, and you’d almost think the well had run dry. Not so, says Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola, who offers up a new take on Hansel and Gretel that should make most contemporary horror fans smile.
The story of Hansel and Gretel begins exactly like the familiar fairy tale: the two young children are dragged out into the woods and, for reasons unknown, left to fend for themselves by their father. While trying to find their way, they encounter a house made of candy inhabited by a witch, who tries to eat the young children. The two vanquish the witch and… well, we never did get the feeling they lived happily ever after, now did we? Instead, the two wind up dedicating their lives to tracking down and executing witches. When the movie catches up with the duo years later, they’ve become bad-ass witch hunters with a killer reputation and an arsenal of unbelievably unrealistic weapons.
This is the kind of film that attempts to show from the start that it’s not going to take itself very seriously so neither should you. When we follow the young siblings through their first encounter with a witch, the makeup style of the villain looks like something right out of a Sam Raimi movie – a stylistic choice used to denote the witches throughout the narrative. In fact, when older Hansel and Gretel (Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton) show up with their arsenal, the scene practically begs for Bruce Campbell’s trademark Army of Darkness patter (“Yo, she bitch. Let’s dance.”). It’s that over-the-top approach that makes Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters such a treat to watch, even if not everyone buys into it on the same level.
While the direction and production design is light-hearted, the performances suffer a bit from what almost appears to be disinterest. Poor Gemma Arterton, who gets her hands a bit dirtier than in Clash of the Titans tries to make the most of the situation, but Jeremy Renner looks about as interested as his Saturday Night Live parody of The Avengers (for those who haven’t seen it, his character runs out of arrows and is ready to go home). Renner probably could have gotten away with being campier (like Peter Stormare does, who revels in his role as the town’s antagonistic sheriff). Ironically the actor who most strongly embraces the film’s silliness is the one who has already gone on record admitting she just did it for a paycheck – Famke Janssen, who puts up with her face being covered by being ridiculously over-the-top with her maniacal character. The performance may wind up netting her a Razzie nomination, but it’s far superior to what Julia Roberts did in last year’s Mirror Mirror.
The biggest shame about Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is that the concept isn’t actually large enough to pull off a feature film (surprising, considering this isn’t the first picture to take on this concept – see also: Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft, available for streaming on Netflix). As a result, the story is inflated with extraneous plot points (Hansel has some sort of sugar poisoning from his time in the candy house) and a convoluted back-story that redeems the cruelty of the children’s abandonment. Most of it isn’t needed and comes back into play in contrived, boring ways. The film could use a little less of this kind of plot fluff and a little more of Hansel and Gretel in combat with their enemies.
Overall, you can’t ask much of a film like Hansel & Gretel and it doesn’t try to deliver much than the concept promises. I would have liked to see a little more camp in the approach, particularly when the movie works so hard to emulate Sam Raimi’s early style, but it’s a hell of a lot more accessible than Wirkola’s Dead Snow. It may not be brilliant, but it’s curious enough to make me interested with what Wirkola might pull out next.
-Rafe Telsch
