>> THE BROTHERS GRIMM
These brothers are certainly not grim, but hot Hollywood stars Matt Damon and Heath Ledger who team up to represent legendary fairytale collators, Will and Jacob Grimm.
These brothers are certainly not grim, but hot Hollywood stars Matt Damon and Heath Ledger who team up to represent legendary fairytale collators, Will and Jacob Grimm.
This film offers you the chance to ‘discover the heroes behind the legend’, as we delve into the particulars of their fairytale experiences. We join them as they roam early nineteenth-century French-occupied Germany, hunting the lands for undesirable forms of ghosts, exorcising ‘evil enchantment’. But it is all an elaborate scam. The brothers are actually con artists pursuing hoax ghouls in order to make a mint from people’s inbred fear.
When their con is discovered, they are sent to battle the sinister force that has caused several young girls to vanish. It is no staged scene this time and the brothers, accompanied by native huntress, Angelika (Lena Headey), must seriously attempt to rid the town of its evil. Spooked?
This is a fairly dark take on what many of us remember as often charming pre-bedtime stories. With his characteristic ‘edge’, Damon remains unperturbed to visit the shadier boundaries of fiction (think Dogma), whilst splicing a sharpened humour into the fray that both heartens and lightens the whole affair. Some spectacular special effects will leave you spellbound by the film’s fantastical element as the Brothers Grimm are thrust into Jabberwocky Forest following the locals’ chilling warnings of “Don’t trust the trees!” Indeed! Although quite why trees have taken on such mind-blowing force and personification in recent years (take Tolkien’s benevolent and heroic Ents, for example), I can only ponder (any theories gratefully received).
This is fast-paced action-excitement that, along with the presence of the generic evil queen (a superbly commanding performance from Monica Bellucci), will set your imagination on fire. To what degree depends on your own interpretation of this long-awaited release from talented director Terry Gilliam, who creates with gusto some visual material from his own fervent imagination. It may possess a scattered plot with maze-like qualities, but once you relax into the recesses of your own imagination, The Brothers Grimm is sure to scintillate and titillate even the most unbelieving of minds.
Hannah May