Buy posters from this movie

What a garish, meandering, and ultimately pointless experience this thing is.

Problem #1: Whoever believed that a guy like Terry Gilliam would work great with a guy like Harvey Weinstein is probably the same guy who thought Michael Jackson would make a good babysitter. Gilliam's a perfectionist, a controller, a wildly creative semi-madman who needs to maintain control over his projects. Harvey Weinstein is a very smart businessman who believes he's the finest film editor that Hollywood has ever seen. (He's wrong.) The idea of Harvey Weinstein footing the bill on a Terry Gilliam film is the stuff of Bizarro World.

Problem #2: The high-concept, low-content screenplay by Ehren Kruger is all premise and no plot. "Hey, let's do, like, a live-action Shrek mixed with some mild Indiana Jones-type adventure and glue the thing together with some of the lamest comedy material ever. It'll be a buddy pic, a story book, and a broad farce at the same time. And I can pull it off because I'm the guy who wrote ... Scream 3 and Impostor ... and Reindeer Games ... and The Skeleton Key..." (crickets) I'm sure there's a germ of a very cool idea buried within the desperate muck that is The Brothers Grimm -- and a germ it remains.

Problem #3: Tone and acting. So the role-reversal offered is this: Matt Damon will play the cocksure swaggerer, while Heath Ledger will play the bookish nerdly guy. Together they are the brothers Grimm, and they wander from village to village, perpetually conning the toothless townsfolk into believing that there's a supernatural threat underfoot -- only to scurry off into the night after performing some sort of mock-exorcism. So, "medieval conmen." OK, it could work. And yet, not here. Damon and Ledger are forever mumbling, twitching, jabbering, and whinging their way through the story -- so when it becomes clear that we're actually meant to care for (or dare I say LIKE) this dullard's duo, the revelation comes as sort of a shock.

And on and on the endless tedium of The Brothers Grimm goes. The film has no sort of rhythm or flow or even the semblance of a cohesive story. There's a sketchy backbone about an evil witch that's stealing children from a grungy village, but it exists only as a coathanger on which to hang an aggressively disconnected series of mini-skits. Watch as the brothers wander through the forest before they go back to the village to stammer amongst themselves. Back into the forest they go, armed only with a few hastily delivered pieces of exposition that feel less like plot points and more like 17th-draft afterthoughts.

Toss in an excessively horrendous supporting performance from the generally quite excellent Peter Stormare, Jonathan Pryce delivering what's arguably the worst work of his entire career, and a directorial approach that adores the visual while ignoring (literally) everything else, and you're looking at one stunning disappointment of a movie. Frankly I never would have believed that Terry Gilliam had a movie this bad in him.

Gilliam's trademark visual style and a few darkly bizarre moments of comedy aside, "The Brothers Grimm" is a chore of epic proportions. What should have been a dark and twisted take on the classic fairy tales has, against all odds, hit the screens looking like so much "deleted scenes" footage. Much as it pains to say it, this is a staggeringly inert, helplessly confused, and periodically infuriating misfire. But it'll take more than one turkey in 20-some years before I'll wash my hands of Terry Gilliam. Let's just call this one an outright blunder and move on to the next masterpiece.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12862&reviewer=128
originally posted: 08/26/05 16:14:45
 printer-friendly format