The movie is at least twice as good as most people say it is and about half as good as we'd all hoped it would be.
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Terry Gilliam's 2005 fantasy "The Brothers Grimm" is a lot like one of the old Monty Python shows he used to work in, with moments of brilliance scattered amidst stretches of tedium and sheer silliness. The movie is at least twice as good as most people say it is and about half as good as we'd all hoped it would be.
Maybe it's a little unfair placing such a burden on Gilliam, but after some dazzling work directing things like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," "Time Bandits," "Brazil," and "Twelve Monkeys," we expect quite a lot from him. He does have a clever idea going here, though. We know that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm got the ideas for their fairy tales partly from existing folklore and partly from their own fertile imaginations. What Gilliam and screenwriter Ehren Kruger ("Scream 3," "The Ring," "Skeleton Key") add is a touch of realism. In the movie, not only do the Grimms make up their stories, they make them up from real-life adventures.
Matt Damon and Heath Ledger star as Will and Jake Grimm, a pair of youthful con men traveling through the German countryside in the early nineteenth century, bilking the peasantry out of their money by claiming to expel demons, slay dragons, banish trolls, and such nonsense. Actually, they fake their exorcisms with props and hired actors to fool the ignorant masses. But they can't fool the regional French magistrate in Germany, General Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce). He sees them for what they are, but he also recognizes that he can use them. A small rural village has been a thorn in Delatombe's side for some time; young girls are mysteriously disappearing there, supposedly through magic, and he has been unable to find out the real cause. Delatombe sends the brothers to the village, on peril of death, to rid it of its supposed supernatural occurrences.
That's when Will and Jake discover that the disappearances are not the work of mere mortals, as they had thought; they're the work of an evil Queen (Monica Bellucci), a vain and selfish sorceress Queen, living at the top of an ancient, crumbling tower deep in the center of an enchanted forest. She locked herself in the tower to avoid the plague that ravaged her people below, and the poor dear's been up there for five hundred years ("They haven't been kind to her, have they?"). She needs the lives of the village girls for a witching spell that will restore her youth and beauty. To get to the tower, the brothers enlist the aid of a lovely local lass, a trapper and guide, Angelika (Leana Headey), whose father disappeared in the woods a year before.
Gilliam playfully jams all the characters he can from fairy tales into one motion picture, among them Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, the Wicked Witch from "Snow White," Rapunzel, the Gingerbread Man, and so on. The more intellectual of the two brothers, Jake, writes down in a journal everything he sees, which of course will become the basis for the many stories the brothers will later write up when they finally decide to change professions.
OK, it's a slick idea for a movie, as I've said. Unfortunately, not everything goes Gilliam's way, and the two leads exemplify the movie's problem. Playing against type, Heath Ledger is the scholarly, sometimes gullible, and generally ineffectual brother, Jake, who as a child traded money with which he was supposed to buy medicine for "magic beans," an act his older brother Will never let him forget. But Ledger is so serious, so dramatic in his role, that he introduces too somber a tone into what ought to be a purely tongue-in-cheek frolic. On the other hand, Matt Damon's acting is so much more lightweight at times and so much more bullying at other times that the two contrasting tones seem always at odds, leaving viewers to wonder just how they're expected to feel about any of it.
Perhaps the funniest person in the film is Peter Stormare as the Great Cavaldi, Delatombe's chief henchman and master of the torturing arts. While Pryce's General is a somber comic villain, Stormare's Cavaldi is a full-blooded comic ruffian, and again the contrast in their characters is representative of the movie's contrasting styles. Is the story supposed to be subtle parody or blunt farce?
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[release]17038[/release]