Review of The Brothers Grimm (2005) by Ola G — 11 May 2018

Will (Matt Damon) and Jake Grimm (Heath Ledger) are traveling con-artists who arrive in French occupied Germany during the early 19th century. They ride into the town Karlstadt to rid the town of a witch's ghost. However, after killing the "ghost", it is revealed that the Brothers Grimm have actually set up fake demons and monsters to trick the village. Afterwards, as they are celebrating at an inn, Italian torturer Mercurio Cavaldi (Peter Stormare) takes them to the French General Vavarin Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce). Delatombe forces them to solve a mystery: the girls of the small village of Marbaden are going missing and the villagers are convinced that supernatural beings are responsible. The Brothers are charged with finding out who is responsible, under the assumption that it is the work of con artists like themselves. However, they soon discover that it is in fact the work of a real supernatural force: a beautiful, yet dangerous, 500-year-old, Thuringian Queen stealing young girls to restore her own beauty. Long ago, King Childeric I came to the forest to build a city while his Queen experiments with black magic to gain eternal life. The Bubonic plague comes and she builds a high tower to avoid it, while her husband and everyone below her perishes. She did not understand the Plague was carried by wind and soon rotted away as she decayed over the years. Her spell granted her immortal life, but not the youth and beauty to go along with it. Her youthful appearance now only exists in her mirror, the source of her life, as an illusion and nothing more. She needs to drink the blood of 12 young women to regain her beauty, 10 have already been reported missing. The Brothers Grimm, with the help of Angelika (Lena Headey), a knowing huntress from the village, and Cavaldi they intend to capture and kill The Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci)...

"The Brothers Grimm" was released with mixed reviews from critics. The majority of critics believed Gilliam sacrificed the storyline in favor of the visual design. Roger Ebert called the film "an invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot. The movie seems like a style in search of a purpose, with a story we might not care about." Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post wrote that "The Brothers Grimm looks terrific, yet it remains essentially inert. You keep waiting for something to happen, and after a while your mind wanders from the hollow frenzy up there with all its filigrees and fretwork." Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle felt "despite an appealing actor in each role, the entire cast comes across as repellent. Will and Jake Grimm are two guys in the woods, surrounded by computerized animals, putting audiences to sleep all over America." Peter Travers, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, largely enjoyed The Brothers Grimm. He explained that "if you're a Gilliam junkie, as I am, you go with it, even when the script loses its shaky hold on coherence." Travers added, "even when Gilliam flies off the rails, his images stick with you." Gene Seymour of Newsday called the film "a great compound of rip-snorting Gothic fantasy and Python-esque dark comedy".

For sure one of Terry Gilliam´s worst films. Ledger and Damon has no real chemistry, dodgy story based on the Grimm´s stories, Stormare is so over the top it hurts, the mix of comedy, fantasy, adventure and horror doesn´t work at all, the acting and dialogue is overdramatized and painful to watch plus bad CGI. "The Brothers Grimm" is a failure in my book. Maybe due to the on-set tensions which was reported or just the fact that Gilliam didn´t manage to put this film together in a satisfying way. Nothing new when it comes to a Terry Gilliam film..