Like a babe in the woods, I clung to hope for much too long that Terry Gilliam's long-delayed fairy tale romp "The Brothers Grimm" would deliver. Surely, the director who'd made some of my favorite movies—including dystopian nightmare "Brazil" and a brilliant adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"—didn't waste his extraordinary talents on this unfunny, cheap-looking haunted house production?
In a script by Ehren Krueger, the Brothers Grimm aren't simply the collectors of folk tales. They travel through French-occupied 18th century Germany (which Gilliam uses for an amusing "Casablanca" reference) as "Team Grimm," fake witch hunters and exorcists of wicked spells. Of course it's all a hoax... until Will (Matt Damon) and Jake (Heath Ledger) encounter real evil magic.
"The Brothers Grimm" seemed like a perfect vehicle for Gilliam's outlandish imagination, a film in the vein of his underrated "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen." All of his obsessions and stock tropes are on display: the cages, the sadistic torturers, the gross-out humor, and Jonathan Pryce. But the script is woefully formulaic and lifeless, and Gillliam's usual visual flair seems hampered by astoundingly low production values—a spooky forest set and morphing witches that probably looked impressive circa 1985 are as bizarre as it gets.
This time, none of Gilliam's inventions feel fresh. We've seen a much spookier village beleaguered by the supernatural in Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow," Moulder and Scully of "The X-Files" made a skeptic-and-believer team with more chemistry, and the fairy tale humor has been done with much more wit in "Shrek." We've seen the Ents march on Isengard in "The Two Towers"—so why would the sight of a few animatronic tree branches excite anybody? It pains me to write this, but "The Brothers Grimm" amounts to a third class theme park ride, much too dark for children, too familiar for adults, and too lame for either. Let's hope Gilliam's upcoming "Tideland" can ease the pain.
