Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters takes us a decade and a half past when these famously abandoned waifs made a fiery exit from a dinner engagement at that gingerbread house where their spell binding host planned the menu with these two as the main course. Something like that could significantly jaundice you opinion of Wicca and in their case indeed it has. No longer children, Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) have made a nice living in the interim dispatching with splattering abandon, wicked witches who mean harm to the innocent. Looks like the Brothers Grimm had it all wrong by the way. As children they were not forsaken by their impoverished wood cutter father at the behest of their cruel stepmother after all. In fact dad only had the one wife who turned out to be quite saintly. Sure, long after her death she has something to do with the current multitude of child kidnappings that bring Hansel and Gretel back to Augsburg, but not in a bad way. Kids are being snatched up by a far reaching witch coven fronted by the shape shifting Muriel (Famke Janssen) who wants them as party favours for the upcoming blood moon. Brother and sister show up in this troubled town just in time to save Mina (Phila Viitala) from being barbecued as a complicit witch by the town’s overzealous sheriff Berringer (Peter Starmore). Turns out Mina has a lot in common with H & G’s dearly departed mother but she’s not why they came. Save for Hansel’s type 1 diabetes from consuming so much gingerbread all those years ago, Hansel and Gretel seem immune to witch magic thus surprisingly have stayed alive to fulfill their vocation for the past 15 years and the siblings waste no time staging copious showdowns with various broom jockeys using their arsenal of oddly sophisticated munitions. Not that, try as they might, their armaments make much of an impact. Don’t expect anything unpredictable with this film but in the absence of a challenge it might let your mind wander. For instance isn’t it an interesting coincidence that the original story was written about the same time as the second amendment was adopted into the US constitution. Too bad the Grimms didn’t originally pencil in some of the lethal fire power from this fable. Those lawmakers might then have had second thoughts about adopting the now sacred right to bear arms.