All Critics (115)
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Top Critics (19)
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Fresh (17)
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Rotten (98)
If this long-delayed and blatantly pandering CGI malarkey is anything to go by, Hollywood's current craze for fairy tales isn't going to have a happy ending.
There isn't much to this beyond the poorly staged, rapidly edited violence; the witches, all but devoid of backstory, are basically canvasses for cartoon splatter.
The movie settles for showers of gore with intermittent moments of spoofiness.
The whole kidding trope, which you can bet was ordered by McKay and Ferrell, is pretty lame, and defeats the leads' attempts to bring shadings to cardboard cartoon characters.
At least it puts forth a sound message: Kids, avoid overdoing it on sweets -- especially candy that doubles as drywall.
Eighty-eight minutes of trash.
...feels like a coven of people in offices visited the set, were shown the mocked-up candy house and then decided to gut the whole thing and make it safe for theatrical and television sales to other countries where there's lots of censorship.
Let's not mince words: Hansel and Gretel is not a good movie.
The gore is a bore and the sweary script just isn't funny.
One suspects that, seriously or tongue in cheek, it's really about the "war against terror" and that Hansel and Gretel are the CIA and the witches belong to al-Qaida.
What will Terra Firma's new overlords think of us if, by some freak set of circumstances, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is all that remains of our once proud hominid civilisation?
There's no reason in the world for Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters not to be good, clean, trashy fun. But it isn't.
Made in Germany, this raucous adventure merrily refuses to follow the usual Hollywood route of blanding-down a fairy tale for the lowest common denominator (see both Snow White movies last year).
[A] fast and furious all-action continuation of the classic fairy tale ...
It's an appalling, insulting and cynical mess from start to finish.
The picture moves fast and is an efficient enough action-horror, with good effects and plenty of violence, but it's too machine-tooled and perfunctory to make you care.
It ends up looking like a witless, cheesy knock-off of the Underworld and Resident Evil movies. They weren't good, and this is worse.
Somewhere in here is a good movie. I guess it got lost in the woods.
Bereft of engaging characters or dialogue, it lurches from one blood-splattered action sequence to the next, even threatening viewers with a sequel at the end.
It's a film which is so demeaningly bad, so utterly without merit, that there is a kind of purity in its awfulness.
It takes a fairy tale and plays it for laughs, without being remotely funny.
Dismal action/adventure fantasy that consists of nothing more than a series of badly directed fight sequences and fails to engage on every conceivable level, thanks to poor direction, lacklustre performances and a badly written, frequently idiotic script.
Lacks all sense of magic, of myth, of danger, of humor, of power. A compete and utter all-around disaster...
Maybe it wouldn't seem so bad if the plot made a lick of sense...but it doesn't!
Gore hounds will relish the sliced appendages count but - with a sharper script - you can't help thinking this could really have cast a spell.
There's rarely a moment where you don't feel like there's at least one reel of footage missing.
88%
74%
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Top Critic
