Movie Review - The Brothers Grimm
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2005 / 118 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz
Terry Gilliam’s films are sometimes a mess, but at least they’re usually entertaining and visually stunning messes. I cite “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” as a perfect example. Say what you will, but it’s not a great movie. It isn’t. Seriously, I’m sorry to break this to you. But it is a mesmerizing film that I’ve watched several times, despite its ample flaws (which have grown less distracting with each viewing). The plot is a mess. In fact, there really isn’t much of a plot. That’s not really the point of “Fear and Loathing”. It does, however, have great visual style and an amazing, oddball performance by Johnny Depp (one of his best, in fact) and it’s one of the few films about drugs that actually makes you feel like you’re on drugs when you watch it, even if you do so utterly stone sober. Still, I think even its biggest supporters will have to admit it’s something of a mess. “Brazil” was a brilliant film, probably Gilliam’s finest and most thought-provoking work, but even “Brazil” isn’t put together as well as it could be. Gilliam is prone to flights of fancy and a bit too enamored of his own visual flair, and that rarely denotes a tightly scripted and paced film. The only real exception in Gilliam’s repertoire is “The Twelve Monkeys”. Now that was a tightly scripted film which still allowed Gilliam to frolic with some impressive visuals (it also had great performances by Madeline Stowe, Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt). Terry showed a modicum of restraint on that one. Then again, maybe the script was so good that even Terry wanted to do it justice.
With “The Brothers Grimm” Terry, for perhaps the first time, seems to be earnestly trying to make a mainstream film. Maybe he wants to make a ton of money and finally get his “Don Quixote” film off the ground. Who knows? The problem is that Terry has never, NEVER made a mainstream film in his life. “Twelve Monkeys” was probably the closest he’s ever come to it, but it was a little too dark and complex to be considered “mainstream”. “The Brothers Grimm” should appeal to the average moviegoer more than anything he’s made since “Time Bandits”, and while sitting through it is not quite the chore that sitting through “Time Bandits” was, it’s by no means a successful film. There are moments of inspiration and whimsy, but they are mired in a dense forest of failed jokes, lifeless action sequences, and boring would-be spectacle.
But before I put the cart entirely ahead of the horse, let me break down the plot for you. The Brothers Grimm (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) of the title are wandering con men, pretending to vanquish supernatural foes and phenomena in every town they breeze into. When the Napoleonic forces of France take over Eastern Europe, however, a French general (Jonathan Pryce) and his bumbling lieutenant (Peter Stormare) capture the Grimms and force them to retrieve a group of young girls kidnapped in a nearby, German village. Soon the Grimms discover that there are actual supernatural phenomena afoot in this town and they must now step up and be heroes if they want to remain free. It’s a promising enough premise, but it’s been given little embellishment by screenwriter Ehren Kruger (who also wrote “The Ring” and “Arlington Road”). The plot of the film is actually a fairly good one, but the movie takes too many side roads and stops at the expense of too many thrills that aren’t thrilling and jokes that aren’t funny. Instead of focusing on what, in the end, turns out to be a decent story, the movie’s script just keeps taking its characters out of an enchanted forest, then putting them back into it, then having them captured by authorities, and then repeating all these events over and over and over again. Seriously, that’s the entire plot this flick has.
Damon and Ledger do their best with the thin characters they’ve been given, but after a promising start, they become nothing more than cardboard cutouts at the service of a plot that becomes overly convoluted in the service of a movie that is absurd and boring where it should be magical and enchanting. Pryce and Stormare seem to compensate for their boring characters by making their own as outlandish as humanly possible. Thank God the scenery is so good, because Pete and Jonathan seem to be ravenous, pushing their French caricatures to annoying extremes. The main goal of the film seems to be bashing the French, a pastime already done to death in so many other venues, in interminable interludes which I suspect were meant to be wacky.
The actors are wasted across the board, as are the special effects (few of which are all that special) and the cool, wannabe-Burton sets of the German town and surrounding forests. Not only that, but there’s a CGI werewolf in this film, and those ALWAYS piss me off. Only at the end of the film does the plot really float to the surface, and by then it’s too little too late. The rest of the film is nothing more than a series of lame French jokes and child abductions, some of which are disturbingly incongruous to the film’s tone. It’s the film’s tone, in fact, that proves its major weakness. It’s all over the map, as if the movie can’t decide whether to be a fun romp or a scary picture or a political satire for the Napoleonic era. In the end, it ends up being nothing but hollow. The Brothers Grimm are reduced to nothing more than half-assed, Napoleonic Ghostbusters without wit or flair…or any other identifiable commodity. The same goes for the movie, which is like a poor man’s Tim Burton film where it should be a big, messy, interesting Gilliam flick. I don’t know if this is actually the case, but it feels like Terry Gilliam compromised his aesthetics to produce a film he felt would be a crowd-pleaser…and still ended up with nothing. Gilliam’s films are usually a mess, but they’re generally more exciting than this.
For all its bizarre moments and gorgeous production design, “The Brothers Grimm” is strangely lifeless and uninspired.
