If you’re looking for a fun ride that’s better directed than written and promises to provide its audience with witch-splattering, head-crushing, body-exploding badassery, then Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters is your ticket. It’s as good as you’d expect, but not necessarily as bad as you figure it would be. The acting is palatable and visuals are adequate, but what more can you ask in a film that tries to expand on the Grimm fairy tale?
As children, Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) are brought into the woods by their father and left to survive on their own. They soon stumble upon a house made of candy, enter, and become the witch’s prisoners. Here, they’re held in cages until Gretel fights her way free and incinerates the witch, allowing her and Hansel to escape, but also mythologizing them as with hunters and local heroes. Newspaper headlines inform us that the siblings rescue children and exterminate witches, something that they’re sleepy little city seems replete with.
Business is good and the arsenal is plenty. The script is shoddy and feels as if it were written by randomly pulling exclamatory lines from a hat. Most often, they are comprised of “Shit!” “Fuck!” and “Witch!” Other adjectives and verbs pepper the screenplay, but it must have taken all of thirty seconds to memorize lines – save “set her ass on fire!”
That aside, there is a creepy subtext running through this film. Admittedly, there’s not much to stimulate thought within, so perhaps I’m digging way too deeply here – like China deep — but the film seems to advocate racial profiling and misguided racism. Seriously.
We are led to believe that witches are these horrible creatures because one happened to hold Hansel and Gretel hostage when they were children. But the hostages were actually criminals, guilty of breaking and entering, trespassing, and ultimately murder. Perhaps Augsberg is the first town in history to employ a Stand Your Ground law. I know we should feel sorry for Hansel, who is a massive diabetic (seriously) because of all the candy he ate from the house, but if anything, he has a problem with restraint. Yes, the witch forces him to eat candy, but it is the saccharine house that initially piques their interest and draws them in. Prior to his forced feeding, he surely must have done some damage to the gumdrop roof and the Life Saver siding, not to mention the gingerbread floors. Why would a witch want a vagrant like that running around? Gretel doesn’t develop diabetes, but she doesn’t prohibit Hansel from gorging, so I can see why she would also need to be restrained.
Perhaps the witch shouldn’t have threatened to eat them, but what’s a witch to do when the authorities would clearly believe two chunky cherubs over a warty, scraggly-haired witch.
It seems that this childhood trauma manifested itself into a motive guided by rash profiling of other witches – when in fact, their aggression and anger should have been aimed toward the parents that sent them out into the wilderness to die. Sure, the film atones for this toward the end, but up until this point, the witch-hunting duo is seeking revenge on the wrong parties. And they’re not the only ones.
The local sheriff (Peter Stromare) accuses various women of “consorting with the spawn of Satan” and uses the tried and true tactics of Salem to prove their guilt: holding them underwater, trying to crush them, burning them alive, etc. Most recently, blame stems from the recent rash of missing children. Certainly, children gone missing is a tragedy, but there’s only one witch that really takes the children. The rest are guilty by association.
And to be fair, I’m not sure I can blame the witch.
Throughout the film, we’re reminded that the best way to kill a witch is to burn her alive. Cutting off her head works, but immolation is superior. And, as it comes to pass, the witch is stealing children to concoct a potion that a makes her and her brood resistant to fire so that they can’t be burned at the stake and exterminated. I might be pragmatic here, but what else are they to do? They’re already branded as otherworldly and hunted for no apparent reason aside from their rotting appearance. So, why would they want to abide by moral or ethical codes of conduct when Hansel, Gretel, and their ilk are skirting their way around the same codes?
A lot of this film boils down to property. Hansel and Gretel invade someone else’s space, begin eating her house and expect sympathy. Many of the witches and warlocks throughout commit no crimes other than being on land that the sheriff’s army and the siblings want – even though it doesn’t belong to them.
And those that draw the most ire are the dark witches, practitioners of black magic, not the white one that Hansel’s been hooking up with. This is cute, but really defines his fair-weather ideologies (and reinforces the plethora of clichés utilized by the screenwriters). At one moment he wants nothing more than to massacre witches that provide him with an agent of blame for his lack of restraint and abandonment issues. At the next, he’s making it with a witch and totally content to only seek out those who practice the “dark arts.” But this phrase too feels a bit ambiguous. Who’s determining the shade of arts here? Is he willing to recognize his own transgressions? Might he be willing to acknowledge that his acts of violence stemmed more thoroughly from mommy and daddy issues than from the presence of witches? Might he and Gretel admit that their affection for one another feels more incestuous than supportive? Are he and his witchy woman prepared to go to counseling prior to taking their relationship any further? Is she aware than leaving this relationship should start a full-on genocide against white and dark witches alike?
I’m fairly certain that this film unintentionally raised all of these questions when all it really wanted to do was eviscerate preternatural beings, but if you don’t provide an audience with some semblance of substance, it’ll have to look for some.
