You know why I didn’t remember that this movie was released? Because it’s terrible.
Jesus wept.
I don’t even know how to explain to you how terrible this movie is. It’s not capital B bad. It’s not good-bad. It just sucks. (For an example of a good-bad movie, see my review of Hellbound).
This movie is so terrible that filling this review with profanity would be a complete and utter waste of perfectly good explicatives.
Plot and action-wise, there’s a lot going on in Brothers Grimm, but none of it’s interesting.
Matt Damon and Heath Ledger play the title characters, and although Monica Belluci gets top billing, Lena Headey is actually the female lead. Since Damon, Ledger, and Headey have all amassed a sizable body of work that demonstrates that they can take direction, it’s pretty obvious that their ghastly performances are the fault of the director.
This has to be the worst thing Terry Gilliam has ever made.
Contemplating all the ways the movie has gone wrong is better than trying to pay attention to why, for instance, the guy who’s a villain for 99% of the movie suddenly has a Big Dramatic Scene where he inexplicably screams mournfully to the heavens when a character who, up until that moment was his nemesis, dies.
The overall ghastliness of this movie is a worthy thing to contemplate if you’re ever tied to a chair and forced to watch this movie. Paying attention to the pointless action and bad plotting and confusing characterizations will pass the time.
Contemplating the badness could probably keep you distracted enough that you don’t ruin your teeth trying to chew through either the ropes or one of your limbs in an effort to escape. The thing that keeps you from expending all of your energy hoppity-hopping your chair-bound self over to a window and figuring out how to fling yourself out of said window, thus leaving you with no energy to do the actual flinging. The thing that keeps you from having a Lovecraftian-break from reality and beginning to rant about how the Old Ones want you to destroy your blu-ray player in an effort to exorcise the badness from the universe.
This movie is terrible. It’s an expensive, loud, elaborate, poorly directed, paced, plotted, and acted mess. It’s too boring and dark for children. It’s too stupid for adults. Maybe dogs would like it?
It’s like someone gave Mork access to all the sets and costumes from a Monty Python film but didn’t make sure he understood what was funny or engaging or even interesting about Monty Python. Or, um, anything really. Anything related to Western Earth Culture, at the very least.
This movie felt like it was 6 hours long. About half-way through it I tried to cheer up by paraphrasing from my favorite review of Blood Rayne. I kept muttering to myself, “Brothers Grimm is still more fun than getting your eyelid caught on a fishhook!”
An hour later, I wasn’t so sure this was true, although by then the movie had left me too depressed to conduct any experiments on the matter, which, in retrospect, is for the best.
If you persist in watching this movie to the end the result will be either a nagging sense of self-loathing or a lot of clean, folded laundry.
I opted for laundry. Husband chose self-loathing. I think he may also have set a new personal Angry Birds high score.
We were both happy to see those final credits role.