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75Wirkola tears through Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters with such giddy abandon, it ends up being splattery fanboy fun. Preposterous, clearly, but fun.
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50The blend of fairy-tale sentiment and knowing irony worked exactly once, in "The Princess Bride," and fails here. But there's enough visual ingenuity - eye candy, if you will - to make this Hansel & Gretel an intermittently tasty temptation.
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42The grim heroes don't have a nuance or more than a hint of emotion between them, and the same goes for the film around them.
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42An intermittently fun, but overexcited and predictable mish-mash.
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Feb 9, 201340Though it gives good splat and the scenery’s to die for, Hansel & Gretel gets just about everything wrong. Hammy, boring, chronically unfunny - there’ll be nightmares before bedtime.
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40Even if he's slumming, Renner gets it best: his dry delivery fully acknowledges the movie's ridiculousness. If you're planning on entering this fractured fairy tale, you'll want to follow his lead.
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40The film is smart enough not to wear out its welcome. But that's the only sign of true intelligence in this juvenile caper.
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Jan 25, 201340While the film rarely provokes any strenuous eye-rolling, it also can't drum up even the slightest interest in the fate of its characters, let alone suspense.
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38Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is more Gatling guns and grenades than The Brothers Grimm.
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Jan 25, 201338A rarely funny spoof that's heavy on bone-crushing and blood-gushing.
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30There isn't much swashbuckling chemistry between Mr. Renner and Ms. Arterton, and the script doesn't give them enough of the witty lines that can elevate these types of movies to must-see status.
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Jan 25, 201330If the similarly situated "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" took itself too seriously, the problem with Hansel & Gretel is that it doesn't quite take itself seriously enough - which sounds insane, but it's not too much to ask that the movie go beyond its one and only joke. Instead, amid all the fake Sturm und Drang, all we hear is the movie giggling to itself.
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25In an age of zombies, werewolves and oversexed vampires, teens won't be shaking in their Uggs over ugly women with bad teeth flying around on brooms, and with its graphic depictions of tortures, mutilations, gang rapes and myriad examples of child abuse, it's no longer a fairy tale suitable for children.
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25The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.
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25Not only is not even a single character more than one-dimensional, but every line falls flatter than a witch dispatched with a Gatling gun.
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25This genre stew throws in so many ingredients - including sundry body parts that are cut off and go flying, and heads that explode - that the result is a tasteless mash-up that's hard to stomach.
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20This movie is a case in point. It's a film which is so demeaningly bad, so utterly without merit, that there is a kind of purity in its awfulness. There is a Zen mastery in producing a film which nullifies the concept of pleasure.
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20No stranger to one-joke premises, writer-director Tommy Wirkola (of 2009's Nazi-zombie "classic" "Dead Snow") populates this frenzied horror-satire with tons of incoherently staged bloodletting and f-bomb–accentuated kiss-off lines. It's a grim fairy tale, all right.
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11In his English-language debut, Wirkola dabbles in everything but commits to nothing, making for an unmemorable brew best left untasted.
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Jan 29, 201310The Brothers Grimm may have come up with some cruel, weird material in their day, but they'd never condone actor abuse like this.
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10What galls is that for all the perspiration in jazzing up an old yarn, there's not a whiff of originality in how Wirkola engages with the perverse pleasures enshrined by the Grimm brothers, two of their era's shrewdest storytellers.
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0What to say about this lame-brained, limp dick attempt to update a classic Brothers Grimm tale into an f-bomb throwing vomit-inducing 3D franchise? I say, screw the damn thing and run the other way.
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0Tommy Wirkola's film suggests A Knight's Tale as penned by Seth MacFarlane.
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0An exceedingly dull and stillborn attempt to update the Brothers Grimm.