Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters review

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (15/R, 88 mins)
Director: Tommy Wirkola
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

For some reason we’ve had any number of fairytale reimaginings lately, to varying degrees of success. This time around the classic Grimm story of brother and sister Hansel and Gretel gets a demented action twist added, and proves to be reasonable value for the undemanding.

We first meet Hansel and Gretel as children, when they are taken at night by their father deep into the woods, where they discover a house made of candy. Instead of falling prey to the witch inside, they destroy her, setting in motion their careers as witch hunters extraordinaire.

Many years later, as adults played by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, they're heroes who travel around the country sorting out witch problems wherever they find them. They arrive at a town where children have been going missing, soon discovering that the local witch (Famke Janssen) has been snatching them, and she’s up to no good with some mumbo-jumbo about becoming all-powerful at the blood moon.

Wisely played tongue in cheek, otherwise it would collapse under its own stupidity, Hansel and Gretel is a cheesy and passably entertaining action fantasy. It’s not really concerned with anything other than witch-fighting action, which the armed-to-the-teeth siblings engage in frequently. These scenes are frantically edited and initially quite samey, but the high level of blood and gore makes for good clean Friday night fun.

Thanks to a $50m budget, production values are high, which can help immensely with this sort of thing - there’s nothing worse than a ridiculous film that looks ugly at the same time. And the special effects are really pretty tidy, particularly a troll who comes to have quite a bearing on the story.

In the leads, Renner and Arterton display little personality, but as the only Americans in the village, their swearing and modern sensibilities in what one supposes is the 19th century offers the chance for a few nice gags.

Events proceed without much care or sense from one barney to the next, but if you’re willing to accept the utter absurdity of the setup, there are a whole lot worse examples of this brand of goofy fantasy action out there.

Tamara Drewe review

Tamara Drewe (15, 111 mins)
Director: Stephen Frears

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

A diverse bunch of people gather at a rural writers’ retreat run by the philandering Nicholas (Roger Allam) and his wife Beth (Tamsin Greig). Into their lives comes Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton), who used to live in the village but has been away for some years, and her return causes passions to run high among the group, as well as an out-of-town a drummer (Dominic Cooper). Based on a newspaper comic strip, this is a broad and overwrought comic drama, pitched like a sitcom in tone, delivery and situation. And just who is Tamara, what does she want and why are we supposed to root for her? It’s full of larger than life characters, not one of whom is remotely likeable or believable (with the possible exception of Beth) and the whole is really rather irritating.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time review

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (12A, 116 mins)
Director: Mike Newell
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The list of movies adapted from video games is not an impressive one. For some reason no one has yet discovered the alchemy of making a video game work on the big screen and the results have ranged from the dull and mediocre (Tomb Raider or Resident Evil) to the downright catastrophic (anything touched by the hand of Uwe Boll).

Faced with the challenge of filming the popular platform adventure Prince of Persia, uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer seeks to the recreate the success of his Pirates of the Caribbean franchise by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to bring it to the screen in as spectacular a fashion as possible.

So while the results were always going to be slick and professional, the fear was how the writing team would be able to come up with a compelling story to match the gorgeous production levels. It’s certainly sweeping and epic, with beautifully realised cities and palaces, but the tale of hero Dastan is an underwhelming one.

Taken in and adopted by the Persian king as a young orphan, Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) has grown into a great warrior fighting alongside his two brothers as the Persian kingdom grows. But when he’s framed for the murder of his father, he must go on the run with a rival princess, Tamina (Gemma Arterton) to clear his name.

The first strike against Prince of Persia is that Dastan is a bit of non-character, an underwritten vessel who provides us with no idea what he actually wants or needs. Tamina is clearly the stronger character and Arterton outdoes Gyllenhaal at most turns during their prickly relationship.

They spend most of the movie bickering over a mystical dagger, the Sands of Time, which has the power to reverse time. If you’re unlucky enough to have seen Nicolas Cage in the hilariously bad Next, you’ll know that with great time-meddling power comes great ridiculousness, and thus the scene is set for an action showdown that zips backwards and forwards, with certain parties keen to get their hands on the dagger for treacherous purposes.

Nods to the game are fun, with Dastan leaping from wall to wall like a good ‘un, but even then the sequence of run, jump, climb, punch quickly becomes familiar. More than that, the scenes are edited into the ground, taking any grace or precision out of them. See Quantum of Solace for an example of how a free running style can be integrated fluidly into the action and look authentic at the same time.

And yet it’s not dull and it’s not stupid, but it’s also not much more than passable fun that’s just a little uninspired.