Rescued by a plot that's just good enough, and acting and special effects that, for all the movie's flaws, are dazzling enough to make it worth watching.
Yet, you can't fault the acting, and there are some funny moments as well as plenty of times when the special effects or sets are just a lot of fun to watch. The brothers don't get much of a chance to work their con in French-occupied Germany before the governor-general catches on to them and offers them a choice—death, or else help Napoleon's soldiers solve the case of 10 young girls who've turned up missing in the village of Marbaden. So the gov's henchman, Cavaldi (Peter Stormare, "Fargo"), bullies the boys for the rest of the movie as he tags along to make sure they hold up their part of the bargain. With a local woman for their guide (Lena Headey), they head off into the woods to solve the mystery and recover the missing girls—something that, for a while, feels a bit like a "Scooby-Doo" adventure without the mini-van ("All my life I've studied these folk tales, Will, and I've finally found one that's real"). But quickly the tone changes. The film didn't pull down a PG-13 rating for nothing. There's violence, frightening sequences, suggestive material, and torture. Wolves are scary, but so are the forces of a centuries-old queen who's still ruling the forest. "Nothing makes sense there," Will complains. "It's like being inside Jake's head."
The film gets darker as it progresses, with the action and special effects also intensifying. That's also a plus, though I could have done without the Ewok celebration at the end.
Video: John J. Puccio gave high marks to the video in the SD release, which means that the source material was pretty decent. Certainly the Blu-ray confirms that. There's haze so clear that it looks like wisps of clouds, and the 1080p High Definition, 1.85:1 aspect ratio picture really adds to our enjoyment of the visuals. The level of detail and black levels are wonderful, and I have no complaints.
Audio: Here too, the English 5.1 (uncompressed) 48kHz/16-bit PCM audio is excellent, with all sorts of rear-speaker to front-speaker sound movement traveling across your TV room. Other sound options are English and French Dolby Digital 5.1, but the six-channel uncompressed sound is much richer sounding.
Extras: Not all the extras from the SD release are included here. There's an excellent (but low-key) commentary by Gilliam in which he says a number of interesting things. It might surprise some people to learn that Steven Soderbergh was a consultant on the film, helping Gilliam decide how to film certain scenes. Even more surprising, given today's PC climate, is Gilliam's admission that this film wasn't exactly easy on the animals. Fires really were set on the backsides of horses (okay, so they had protective blankets, but still . . .), ravens were tied to branches to make sure they didn't leave, toads were licked, one horse died the day after a scene which had him ingest spiders (a cinematic illusion but one heck of a coincidence), and a live rabbit was bought to be gutted and skinned by Headey, but because she was a vegetarian she vigorously protested . . . and saved the rabbit.
The other extra are a dozen deleted scenes with optional commentary, one of which, as John J. Puccio pointed out in his review of the SD release, was good enough to be in the film, and the rest . . . well.
Bottom Line: "The Brothers Grimm" ought to have been a tour de force, but as an odd stew of fairy tale allusions and "Scooby-Doo" mystery-solving, it's rescued by a plot that's just good enough, and acting and special effects that, for all the movie's flaws, are dazzling enough to make it worth watching.
The film gets darker as it progresses, with the action and special effects also intensifying. That's also a plus, though I could have done without the Ewok celebration at the end.
Video: John J. Puccio gave high marks to the video in the SD release, which means that the source material was pretty decent. Certainly the Blu-ray confirms that. There's haze so clear that it looks like wisps of clouds, and the 1080p High Definition, 1.85:1 aspect ratio picture really adds to our enjoyment of the visuals. The level of detail and black levels are wonderful, and I have no complaints.
Audio: Here too, the English 5.1 (uncompressed) 48kHz/16-bit PCM audio is excellent, with all sorts of rear-speaker to front-speaker sound movement traveling across your TV room. Other sound options are English and French Dolby Digital 5.1, but the six-channel uncompressed sound is much richer sounding.
Extras: Not all the extras from the SD release are included here. There's an excellent (but low-key) commentary by Gilliam in which he says a number of interesting things. It might surprise some people to learn that Steven Soderbergh was a consultant on the film, helping Gilliam decide how to film certain scenes. Even more surprising, given today's PC climate, is Gilliam's admission that this film wasn't exactly easy on the animals. Fires really were set on the backsides of horses (okay, so they had protective blankets, but still . . .), ravens were tied to branches to make sure they didn't leave, toads were licked, one horse died the day after a scene which had him ingest spiders (a cinematic illusion but one heck of a coincidence), and a live rabbit was bought to be gutted and skinned by Headey, but because she was a vegetarian she vigorously protested . . . and saved the rabbit.
The other extra are a dozen deleted scenes with optional commentary, one of which, as John J. Puccio pointed out in his review of the SD release, was good enough to be in the film, and the rest . . . well.
Bottom Line: "The Brothers Grimm" ought to have been a tour de force, but as an odd stew of fairy tale allusions and "Scooby-Doo" mystery-solving, it's rescued by a plot that's just good enough, and acting and special effects that, for all the movie's flaws, are dazzling enough to make it worth watching.
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[release]20101[/release]