The Brothers Grimm

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Well it is a Terry Gilliam film so was always going to be a bit eccentric - but the idea that the legendary Brothers Grimm were actually grifters was actually quite an fun one. Assemble a couple of A-listers and we should have been flying. Except, well - we are not. Instead of having some amiable horseplay as they fleece the gullible and the unwitting, we find "Jake" (Heath Legder) and "Will" (Matt Damon) in a village where the children have all gone missing. The local grandee "Gen. Delatombe" (Jonathan Pryce) is on to their scamming and decides it's time to get them to prove their worth. Where are the sprogs? Well to save their necks, the not so dynamic duo have to deal with a seriously malevolent and fantastic foe in the "Mirror Queen" (the sparingly used Monica Bellucci) who wants to take over the world kind of thing. What now ensues are a series of typical Gilliam-esque escapades using a mediaeval backdrop to facilitate the borderline slapstick antics of the siblings trying to save their bacon. At times it is quite amusing offering some enjoyable parodies of established fairy tales, and the script does deliver a few entertaining quips as we go along but it seems unsure just who it's for. There's some darkness and good, old-fashioned, evil - but not enough of that. It's as if it was trying to be scary but hadn't quite the courage (to settle for a higher age rating, maybe?). As it is, it falls between two stools leaving us with an undercooked and overlong, slightly repetitious, series of frying pan to fire scenarios that even the engaging Ledger can't spin out for two hours. Damon doesn't really add much and Pryce is just in uniformed ham mode through his brief appearances. If you know the works of the brothers, it will make much more sense and some of it's observations about superstitions and the society in which the peasantry and gentry lived are quite witty, but they are all to often lost in a sea of mediocrity.

Does it deserve 10 stars? No, but I look at this as a thumbs up or thumbs down thing, and it's getting thumbs up, sooo...disclaimer there. I really liked this and I accept that I am in the minority. It has the Terry Gilliam comedic feel to it and it has the Terry Gilliam acid trip feel to it... and even at it's worst that is still absolutely entertaining and a pure joy to watch. Someone mentioned wide angle work before and, yes, it has a lot of that wide angle close-up work that can only really be appreciated by people that thought they could out Thompson Hunter Thompson in their youth... wink wink nudge nudge, if you know what I mean. The only real draw back is that Damon doesn't seem to fit in his role, and he doesn't really seem to fit in a Gilliam film...but surprisingly Ledger seems perfectly at home in that kind of world and you get the sense that he enjoyed acting the part as much as you are enjoying watching him act the part. And then here and there you get a joke, a sight gag, a little hint that reminds you that, yeah, Gilliam was in Python wasn't he? That's something that you'd see in the Flying Circus shoved in there. Almost to the point where you can't but stop and wonder if he was channeling Idle or Chapman for some of the dialogue and physical humor. It's a Gilliam film, made for adults, with Warner Brothers Cartoon violence. It's trippy and fun and it might not be your cup of tea, but I loved it.