WGTC Weekly Throwdown: Not So Classic Fairy Tale Adaptations

Alex – The Brothers Grimm

It pains me in so many ways to write about how horrible The Brothers Grimm is, but no matter how much I wanted to like this movie, I just couldn’t.

I mean, come on, Heath Ledger and Matt Damon starring as brothers in a movie by Terry Gilliam. How could that not rock? Well, to put it simply, it could not rock by turning two German scholars into witch fighting con-men.

The movie is predictable from start to finish, and not just because we already know all the fairy tales that are meshed together. Why meander for half the film around the fact that they’re going to run into some real enchanted crap? Why not just put it out there and have the whole film be about that? Now that would have been something interesting.

Probably the worst part of the whole film is Ledger’s character. A boy so dim-witted that he actually thought magic beans would be better than medicine for his brother, and a man who is still grieving and letting his entire life be run by one decision from his youth is an absolutely horrible character. He’s a mere shell of the kind of character that would actually lend something valuable to the plot, but falls as far short as Rapunzel’s hair after a Natalie Portman cut.

Peter Stormare is a very good actor, but he was very, very bad in this film. It was like he was trying to imitate the silliness of a Johnny Depp character with some funky over-exaggerated accent that was painful to listen to every single minute of the film. I even considered turning the subtitles on and the sound off for his scenes.

The cameos of the characters from the beloved fairy tales are merely that, brief cameos that hardly lend anything to the film. I haven’t the foggiest idea why they didn’t come up with some intricate story weaving together all of Grimm’s tales. Now that would have been a film worth watching. As is, The Brothers Grimm is the most disappointing fairy tale film I’ve ever seen.