‘Hansel and Gretel’ is disturbing on many levels

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is a seriously disturbing piece of crap.

I am a free speech absolutist. I believe people have the right to make and show any kind of art they want to, no matter how offensive or in poor taste it may be.

That doesn’t mean, however, I believe all works of art have merit. Sometimes an artistic creation is so noxious, so devoid of human decency the public should vote with their wallets and refuse to see it. This is such a movie.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is loosely based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel.

Just as in the classic story, Hansel and Gretel are left in the forest by their father, wander into a witch’s cottage and end up killing the witch before she can eat them.

In the film, however, this inspires Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton), to start a career together as witch hunters.

When a mysteriously large amount of witch activity causes a city to hire them, however, Hansel and Gretel are faced with a threat bigger than any they’ve tackled before, one with direct links to their past.

Let’s begin with a little history lesson.

Witch hunting in early modern Europe was a campaign of terror that historians estimate claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people. This wasn’t some heroic adventure, this was the rampant slaughter of innocent people, mostly women, based on superstition.

To make a movie that, even as a fantasy, legitimizes this horror, is, in my view, bad taste. But Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters doesn’t even manage to do a decent job making its plot palatable.

The whole premise of the film is Hansel and Gretel make a career out of killing witches, often by seeing that they are burned alive.

Now, the witches in this movie are supernaturally deformed, magically powered and kill and kidnap children. Yet, when you realize this exact same fictional narrative was used as an excuse to murder actual people during the witch hysteria, it kind of puts a damper on your ability to enjoy what’s going on.

The film is also cowardly.

A big plot point is the burning of witches. Yet, despite this being Hansel and Gretel’s preferred method of disposing of them, this is never something you see in graphic detail. Why? Because seeing someone burnt alive is horrifying and something most people wouldn’t wish on even the most vile human being.

Showing witches, even evil, deformed, actually-magical witches, being burned would be too much for most audiences, and make them wonder what kind of twisted sadists Hansel and Gretel actually are.

So instead they make sure this awful act happens off screen, leaving Hansel and Gretel to casually talk about it without jeopardizing their heroic status.

Speaking of disturbing stuff, the film’s title sequence actually gave me the willies.

It shows a number of stylized drawings detailing Hansel and Gretel’s witch hunting career. Except at least one of those drawings was a repurposed version of an actual historical drawing of convicted witch’s being hanged. Needless to say, it was the opening salvo in putting me off of this movie.

Perhaps the only saving grace this piece of garbage has is it’s as technically awful as it is offensive.

The acting is flat, the world design is muddled, the plot is hacked together and the action is uninspired. To top it all off, it’s in 3D, which serves only to jack up the ticket price and provide a few shots of viscera flying at the screen.

It should also be noted that, a number of the witches shown in this movie are either deformed or elderly. This is supposed to show their corruption, but again, historically, these were groups targeted by the witch hunts.

All this history talk may seem unimportant, but history, and how it is portrayed in the movies, matters.

A friend’s mom, who works as a school teacher, once detailed how a child said in a paper that mammoths helped build the pyramids. When questioned about it, they said they’d seen it in the movie 10,000 B.C.

I doubt that any child will ever use Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters as the basis for a book report (and no parent should take their child to see this sadistic gore fest under any circumstance), but the history upon which it is based is very real.

Turning the murderers of innocent people into action heroes isn’t fun or innovative, it’s gross.

I sincerely hope that whoever funded this movie loses money on it. It literally has no redeeming qualities. Avoid it like the plague.

Posted by Bera B. Dunau on February 6, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Columns,Movie Reviews,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry