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100Gilliam has rarely been more inventive, energetic, or just plain funny.
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80Just as fabulously cartoon-Gothic as "Sleepy Hollow."
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A wildly wondrous reinvention of the story of the chroniclers of dark, occasionally horrific, child-pleasing fairy tales.
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80This brisk, free-falling fantasy about the famous collators of German fairy tales, played here as a kind of comedy act by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, is Terry Gilliam's most entertaining work since the glory days of "Time Bandits," "Brazil," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," and "The Fisher King."
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75If you're a Gilliam junkie, as I am, you go with it, even when the script by Ehren Kruger (The Skeleton Key) loses its shaky hold on coherence.
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75In the end it's still Gilliam Lite, but Gilliam Lite is better than no Gilliam at all.
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75The result is minor Gilliam: still more engaging than most moviemaking, but nonetheless a letdown after such a long wait.
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75It's a barrage of visual stimulation so excessive that it's hard to sort it all out. But it's often funny, its texture can be breathtaking and its pleasures likely will grow with repeated viewings.
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70Damon, an underrated comic actor, is particularly good as an ultra-rationalist who'll scream like a girl and run from anything he can't immediately explain.
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63The result is a bit of a mess: sometimes delightful, sometimes tedious, always creative.
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63If The Brothers Grimm flies apart like a badly designed airplane (and it does), it still has more going for it than most of the movie fare this summer.
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63An absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be.
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63Sorry, but the real Grimms did a whole lot more with a great deal less.
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60Hugely ambitious but often failing to live up to those ambitions, Terry Gilliam's long-awaited The Brothers Grimm emerges as a folkloric adventure that intermittently entertains.
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60Gilliam at his best and his worst.
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58Strenous yet flat, The Brothers Grimm is a let's-see-what-sticks spectacle that, coming from Terry Gilliam, is more grim than "Grimm."
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50A work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot.
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Never calms down for a second. It's the visual equivalent of the "Sabre Dance," and its only oxygen comes from the actors, who are quite good.
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50The Brothers Grimm gives you plenty to look at, but it's not much to see.
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50Seriously lost in the woods. This aimless epic about a pair of charlatan brothers sinks under the weight of a problematic script, questionable star casting, hamfisted editing -- and penny-pinching by Gilliam's latest patrons, the Brothers Weinstein.
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50Brothers never catches fire the way Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" did. And you almost feel during subpar special effects that sweaty stagehands are pushing the trees around.
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50Neither Grimm comes across as especially interesting to watch, and neither does anything in the movie offer much to get excited about.
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50Although Gilliam's bright color palette and weird camera angles lift the film, it has an overall sense of darkness, as if shot among people who have yet to see the Age of Enlightenment.
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50Although The Brothers Grimm is partly an inventive fantasy, it's also a cluttered, jangly action picture, and there's too much noise and commotion for Gilliam's subtler ideas to really resonate.
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50The Brothers Grimm reeks of compromise, of a brilliant fantasist losing his footing and nerve and getting hopelessly gummed up in the cruel machinery of big-budget blockbuster filmmaking.
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50Unfortunately, although Gilliam has always had a taste for the outre, he has allowed it to get out of hand here and swallow the picture whole. There's an excessiveness, an unwelcome too-muchness to "Grimm's" creepy moments.
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50Kitted out in period garb and dubious British accents, the actors throw themselves into this flimsy contrivance with energy, but are badly served by a director focused on flipping switches and twirling knobs. Despite a few early sparks of promise The Brothers Grimm sputters and coughs along like an unoiled machine, grinding gears and nerves in equal measure.
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50Like a lot of Gilliam's movies it's too overloaded--antic, indulgent, overdesigned--to get off the ground for more than a minute or two at a stretch.
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50The tilt here toward a hyperactive, buddy-movie action-adventure with loud comic archetypes is a poor fit for a film that relies on fairy tale icons and themes.
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40On the whole, The Brothers Grimm is a mess; a formerly daring director's attempt to cash in on big studio backing even after the rug has been pulled out from under him.
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40This is one of the most visually off-putting films ever made by a director who supposedly makes beautiful pictures.
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38The film seems almost intentionally bad in most ways, as if Gilliam were expressing a suicide wish for his directing career.
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30It's easily the ugliest film Gilliam's ever made, a movie shot with a lens someone forgot to wipe. It's also his loudest: Every scene is amped up to 11, and every line of dialogue is delivered as though it's a cry for help from the bottom of the well.
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30Not terrible so much as terminally silly.
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25It's the cinematic equivalent of an all-dessert meal: After the initial jolt, the lack of any real nourishment is apparent, and it becomes a struggle to stay awake.
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20Gilliam does two things well: mud and trees.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 32
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Mixed: 4 out of 32
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Negative: 12 out of 32
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CraigA3Looks good, when not let down by dodgy cheap SFX, but ultimately a mess.