Fair to muddling
The Huntsman revamps its way to the middle of the pack
There’s a modern moral at the heart of The Huntsman: Winter’s War, and it has nothing to do with vanity or true love or anything else Snow White tried to teach us. It’s a warning to girls who have seen Frozen more than 50 times: You are what you watch.
Freya certainly seems to have taken the Disney film to heart.
Played by Emily Blunt (underemoting as though auditioning for a Botox commercial), she discovers in a moment of anguish that she has the power to conjure all manner of ice.
So she heads north to found a queendom just a talking snowman away from the one in Frozen, its battles waged by an army of urchins. (It takes a child to raze a village.)
Her sister Ravenna (Charlize Theron) stays home to play out the story told in 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman, and helpfully recapped by narrator Liam Neeson in this one.
But this is really Eric the Huntsman’s story. In fact, with Chris Hemsworth front and centre and Thor-y on the poster, and “Winter” and “’s War” in the title, it’s almost as though director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan is trying to fool us into thinking this is a new Avengers movie.
Eric is one of Freya’s child soldiers, as is Sara, played in adulthood by Jessica Chastain.
They fall in love at the tender age of one montage. But the queen has forbidden such plot devices, and so Eric finds himself banished. Jump-cutting past the Snow White story, Eric is enlisted to track down the magic mirror, which everyone and their queen would like to get their mitts on.
This quest involves working with a quartet of dwarfs, played with great humour by Nick Frost, Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith and Alexandra Roach. It also pits our heroes against a pack of goblins, which sounds scary until you realize that your 2016 Goblin has the same weakness as a 1974 Ford Pinto.
Winter’s War was written by the odd couple of Evan Spiliotopoulos (his credits include a slew of Disney direct-to-video titles) and Craig Mazin (a couple of Scary Movies and Hangovers).
To their credit, the story is reasonably original, with enough reversals and double-crosses to keep us on our toes, and some weird background fauna in case you get tired of looking at Hemsworth and Chastain — although that’s doubtful.
It’s also nice that the two stars clearly went to the same dialogue coach for their Scottish accents. So often these vaguely medieval tales feature a vocal free-for-all (see 2013’s Hansel & Gretel).
But this is mere window-dressing, or perhaps mirror-dressing.
The central tale is a bit too thin, a little too slapdash, and far too eager to suggest yet another prequel/sequel. In reviewing Snow White in 2012, critic Jay Stone said it was the fairest of them all. Not great, not risible, just fair. Winter’s War provides a new contender for that title.