In spite of being a nearly unwatchable train wreck of high concepts ("Sleepy Hollow" meets "Ghostbusters" meets "Shreck") there's perhaps a half hour of enjoyable entertainment in "The Brothers Grimm." It's simply not worth sifting through the garbage heap of director Terry Gilliam's imagination to find it.Of course, Gilliam has based his reputation on over-the-top art direction and irreverent humor, but in returning yet again to his penchant for lampooning medieval romanticism with revolting squalor, "Brothers Grimm" hits the wall with a resounding thud.
In nearly every way, the film is simply a mess.
As a feast for the eyes, it's a rather putrid one, literally crawling with bugs and laced with a half dozen grotesqueries that might have been more palatable in an outright horror movie, but which seem sickeningly out of place alongside the Grimm brothers' playful whimsy.
The saving grace of the film is actress Monica Bellucci as The Mirror Queen, who works the same charm she used in infusing The Matrix Reloaded with much needed seductive magic.
Even jokes that worked in the movie's trailer with the benefit of revised timing fall flat in the context of the film itself. By trying to be twice as clever as the films that came before it, "The Brothers Grimm" succeeds in being only half as good. The expression 'too much is never enough' is an all too apt description for Terry Gilliam's style of heavy handed cleverness.
For example: setting the story in Germany is not enough when it can be set in French Occupied Germany, a lame joke that opens a floodgate of even worse 'French' and 'German' jokes; next, the heroes' horses cannot be simply chased away by hostile soldiers when they can have their haunches set on fire to make them run; a dungeon filled with threatening, spinning blades cannot be used to its full potential unless a kitten is 'accidentally' kicked into the machinery for a little slapstick comedy.
Grim, indeed. A more appropriate title might have been "The Brothers Groan."
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