I love bad action movies. Road House is one of my all-time favorite films. I can quote Point Break, chapter and verse. I will happily sit through Bad Boys II. I have a high threshold of pain when it comes to bad action movies.
I like fairy tales too—I recently read the complete Grimm and OH MY GOD, it’s some deeply f*cked up stuff. I get why everyone wants to make fairy tale movies, I really do. It’s fertile ground.
And I’ve got a soft spot for Jeremy Renner; you should know this by now or click here and here to get caught up.
So Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters? It should be easy math. Cheesy action movie + fairy tale + Jeremy Renner = Sarah will love this.
WELL I DON’T.
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is hilariously awful. And I don’t mean “so bad it’s funny”, I mean “it’s hilarious how bad this movie is”. Subtle, but it’s the difference between enjoying trash for trash’s sake and wanting to claw your own eyeballs out because a movie is trying to kill you with its terribleness. I’ve said it before—Renner will be lucky to get out of this mess only mildly embarrassed.
The trailer for Hansel & Gretel came out yesterday and as you can see, this was an ill-advised project. I can see, maybe if I squint in the right light, where it might have looked good on paper, once upon a time. Again, go back to the Grimm story—Hansel and Gretel is some dark, creepy sh*t. And the premise isn’t bad. How does being nearly cannibalized only to turn around and cook your kidnapper alive affect those kids down the line? But in order to pull that off, you have to be willing to go to a very dark, very troubling place. Paramount, where the debate is whether or not to cut H&G at R and hope for “campy horror romp” or go for PG-13 and try to get kid dollars (there’s a parallel with the fairy tale in there somewhere), clearly is not committed to getting that disturbing with this movie. So we’re left with this candy-colored, leather-vested trash.
This movie is going to crash and burn, hard. And Jeremy Renner is going to bear the brunt of it. Look at this trailer—he’s narrating it and he’s the clear focal point for the audience. All this trailer is saying is, “Look it’s Hawkeye! You liked Hawkeye, right? Well come see Steampunk Hawkeye drown Famke Janssen in a tub or something! …Please?” So yeah, he’s going to eat it with this movie because the entire marketing campaign is just JEREMY RENNER IS IN THIS.
“We got a taste for blood. Witch blood.”
REALLY?
Oh Renner. I hope the money was good.
Attached - Renner on Sunday promoting The Bourne Legacy in Berlin.
