Missing the magic
Witch Hunters is a medieval mess of a fairy tale,
What is Jeremy Renner doing in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters? Surely this kind of witchery is tailor-made for Nicolas Cage, he of Season of the Witch, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Ghost Rider.
Best guess: Befuddled by weapons-heavy acting roles in Mission Impossible, The Avengers and The Bourne Legacy, Renner thought he was doing pickup shots for an earlier movie.
Granted, Hansel & Gretel is set in medieval times — the budget for thatch and wattle must have been enormous — but there are enough anachronisms (Gatling guns, 1861; phonographs, 1877; insulin, 1920; tasers, 1974; etc.) that Renner might have been fooled.
Gemma Arterton in the other lead role makes more sense, since she regularly pops up in the likes of Prince of Persia, Clash of the Titans and the dreams of a certain movie-going demographic. You can almost hear the filmmakers exchanging highfives, “More like Handsome & Great-el!”
To their credit, both stars perform their roles earnestly, even when forced to utter lines such as, “The only good witch is a dead witch.” (Also, expect a wiccan outcry at the film’s depiction — nay, endorsement — of the torture of witch-folk.)
The script is by Dante Harper and director Tommy Wirkola, whose previous work includes the Norwegian Nazi zombie horror-comedy Dead Snow. No credit is given to Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, who collected and popularized the original folk tale, and I believe also discovered insulin.
A pre-credit sequence shows how young siblings Hansel and Gretel were abandoned by their parents, captured by a crone in a candy-panelled bungalow, and almost eaten before turning the tables on their captor. We see the news in a medieval periodical — Witch Killed By Orphan Children — thus raising the question: Did early gazettes have reporters on the orphan, arson and witchcraft beat?
But you don’t want to start asking questions. Ignore the fact that the characters know about Copernicus’s heliocentric universe and yet believe that lunar eclipses happen “once in a generation” and not every six months or so.
Also, don’t try to pin down the precise location of events from the actors’ free-range accents, which include Swedish, Finnish, Dutch and Bakersfield. Arterton, who hails from England, is the only one to put on a fake voice, presumably to match that of her character’s brother. The movie was shot in Germany, and is set in medieval Augsburg, an actual Bavarian city, though no longer medieval.
There are precious few surprises in the plot, which follows H&G as they fight and destroy evil witches while wondering if there might not be a few good, Glinda types lurking about. Thomas Mann — no, not the Nobel laureate — joins them as a young witch- hunting wannabe, while Famke Janssen plays the wickedest one of all.
Producer Adam McKay has been vocal about the franchise possibilities for Hansel & Gretel, and there may be merit in the idea.
If the siblings can find a cure for aging, they could wait a few years and join forces with vampire scourge Abraham Lincoln and the zombie dispatchers of Pride and Prejudice. Then Renner could feel he’s back in The Avengers after all.