Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was originally supposed to be released back in 2012, and even debuted in Cannes in 2011. Its release got pushed back to 2013, however, to work better with Jeremy Renner's (Hansel) appearances in two other films released at around the same time.
So, Hawkeye and Black Wido- sorry, Hansel and Gretel are witch hunters. They're the children from the Grimm fairy tale, all grown up, and now they travel the land ridding villages of witches similar to the one that nearly got them all those years ago. They do this wearing lots of black skintight leather, and Hansel is a good shot with ranged weapons, so you can see my confusion over whether Thor and Captain America were going to drop in as well. They get hired to find a town's missing children, who turn out to have been kidnapped as part of a ritual for a lunar eclipse, and of course as they investigate they find ties to their past and a more powerful witch than they've faced before. All the usual plot hooks.
Okay, I want to get my biggest problem with the film out of the way first. We establish relatively early in the film that, as a result of eating so much gingerbread house as a child, Hansel now has Diabetes, except the film refers to it as "sugar sickness". To treat this, Hansel has to inject himself with what I assume is insulin several times a day. My problem here is two-fold. Firstly, the term "diabetes" has been in use since approximately 230 BCE, not "sugar sickness" or anything like that. Second, and really more of an issue, is that there was no injectable treatment for diabetes until 1921. I am willing to suspend my disbelief for a lot of things, but this stood out so blatently to me that I was unable to fully concentrate on the film whenever it came up. Finally, after bringing the whole "needs regular not-insulin or will die" thread up early in the film, the plot then completely disregards it for half the film until near the end, when it inevitably returns like Chekov's Convenient Diabetic Coma.
Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let's look at the rest of the film.
I actually enjoyed this film - something which genuinely surprised me. I mean, its plot is pretty shallow and it relies a lot on its fight and CGI gore scenes to sustain it and the audience's interest. Hansel and Gretel walk around casually with American accents while most of the rest of the cast are trying to affect or have central European accents. And most of the characters bar the primary ones are pretty interchangable and thus not really able to capture our interest for more than a few seconds. But despite all of that, it's quite a fun film. Part of the enjoyment (for me at least) was a troll called Edward that I'm almost certain was a riff on Twilight. But the main draw was the character of Gretel.
Seriously, she's awesome. She's a proper action girl who doesn't need to be rescued constantly or is the weak link or even second-stringer in the witch hunting team. She headbutts unlikable characters. She swears like... well, me. She's good with all manner of weapons and she's quite clearly the brains of the duo of her and Hansel (not that Hansel's a slouch, but he's mainly there for heavy weapons and quips and getting it on with a sexy redhead). Gretel made the film significantly more watchable for me; no mean feat when the first quarter of the film got me quite furious with Hansel's not-diabetes and the steampunk-but-not-quite setting.
It's not a deep film. It's not a subtle, nuanced film. But dammit, it's fun.
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