Review of The Brothers Grimm (2005) by Andrew F — 04 Jun 2017

I wrote this as the film played out. No way do I want to watch it again in order to write something more coherent!

Initially just plain deadly dull. Makes Van Helsing look like a towering masterpiece.

It doesn't so much have a plot as characters repeatedly telling you what the plot is. Nothing is terrifying - the actors just say they are terrified.

It's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang without the Car or Neuschwanstein or Gert Froebe or Caractacus Potts or Truly Scrumptious or the children or Robert Helpmann or Benny Hill. It's the Singing Ringing Tree without the singing ringing tree.

Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are the two most miscast actors in the history of cinema. Between them they have the charisma of Chitty's spare wheel. Damon is the worse of the two, but that's mainly because he gets more lines. They pronounce Kassel (rhymes with hassle, just as it is written) as "Karzel"!

In theory the idea is that the two brothers (philologists, not authors) accidentally get into one of their own fairy tales looking for missing children, but that doesn't begin until more than half-way through, and it's only incidental. The context for the whole is the Napoleonic wars, which regularly intrude, and it seems that the French represent modern tyrannical unimaginative realism (or the USA or Hollywood), whereas the Germans represent an older, more imaginative idealism, but given 20th c. history, the unintentional irony is pretty bitter. And in the end the Grimms' world is not destroyed by the French, it self-destructs. Or is that meant to be historical? Gilliam has a degree in politics, so anything is possible, but you'd be foolish (I know I have been) to try to read too much into this movie. 113 minutes wasted from your life.