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It should have been enchanting.

Terry Gilliam, the director of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Fisher King, seems like the perfect filmmaker to take the dark, sinister, twisted tales originally spun by the Brothers Grimm and re-invent them for the big screen. After all, the Disney-fied versions have given shiny, happy makeovers to those classic stories, altering the fact that characters sometimes lived less-than-happily ever after.

Give the man some credit—in The Brothers Grimm, a film written by Ehren Kruger (The Ring Two, Scream 3), Gilliam manages to paint appropriately grim pictures and stir up some spooky situations. Kruger's script focuses not on the real Grimm brothers, but on two half-witted characters by the same name who find themselves stuck in a tapestry of fairy tales. These Grimms are con men who pretend to save villages from curses and monsters. When they stumble into a town that is persecuted by a real wicked witch, they're in for a world of trouble. It's a great premise, bursting with macabre and comical possibilities.

Unfortunately, the result is a mess, clearly the result of studio tampering and poor screenwriting. Even Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, and Monica Belucci can't save this misguided, over-hasty film with its under-developed characters and lousy special effects. While some of the darker details disqualify this as a film for small children, there's just enough cleverness and visual imagination to make it an entertaining matinee for grown-up fantasy fans. But it's hard to ignore how much better Grimm might have been.

My full review is at Christianity Today Movies, and an extended edition with more about Gilliam's legacy of troubled film projects is posted at Looking Closer.

Harry Forbes (Catholic News Service) writes, "The overall theme is superstition versus enlightenment, as exemplified by the backward German peasants and the more 'cultivated' French. The film is marred by a slow start and an uneven screenplay. With more fleshing out, the two leads would come off less like stick figures and the plot would be more believable, even within the framework of fantasy. So, too, the abrupt changes in mood from serious to slapstick comedy don't always work. … But Gilliam gets high marks for creating an evocative, 19th-century world … and whipping up a good deal of excitement as the story races to its conclusion."

Even though the original Grimm tales were troubling, some reviewers seem surprised that the film has elements of horror. Marcus Yoars (Plugged In) says the original Grimm brothers "may have written unforgettable, imaginative stories that have mesmerized kids for centuries, but The Brothers Grimm is definitely not for children. More horror than adventure, the movie depicts a scary, spooky world filled with evil spirits, horrifying beasts, enchanted beings and sinister spells."

"Most disturbing to believers," says Eric Rice (Crosswalk), "is that the village people tell a story (with venom) about how a 'Christian king' came into the forest, killed all the trees and built a city." (Well, Christian kings have done worse in history.) Rice also cautions viewers that the film is "violent, gory, scary, dark and misses on a lot of humor beats." And he finds the fact that Matt Damon and Heath Ledger look less-than-handsome "off-putting." (They're felons, running from the law, running out of money, trekking through the wilderness. Shouldn't they look a bit dirty?)

Mainstream critics, many of whom have longed for Gilliam's return after a seven-year absence from the screen, are disappointed.

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September (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49