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Gilliam's latest move is just too 'Grimm'
Critic's rating: 
Director: Terry Gilliam
Stars: Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Lena Headey
MPAA rating: PG-13 for violence, frightening sequences and brief suggestive material
Like, who is its intended audience?
As a co-author of Monty Python material and one of the British group's performers, director Terry Gilliam knows his way around a satire -- "Brazil" included -- a point not necessarily evident in such works as "Twelve Monkeys" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
For "The Brothers Grimm," director Gilliam teamed with screenwriter Ehren Kruger ("The Skeleton Key," "The Ring" series) for a marriage of content and style that may make you wonder if even a divorce would succeed.
In the grim Gilliam-Kruger reconceptualization of fairy-tale fodder, real-life brothers Wilhelm (Matt Damon) and Jacob Grimm (Heath Ledger) -- they prefer Will and Jake -- are con men bilking village yokels in French-occupied Germany in 1811.
The former womanizes and the latter boozes between theatrical tricks -- too advanced for their day -- involving the liquidation of witches.
While plea-bargaining with wicked French Gen. Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce) and comic torturer Cavaldi (Peter Stormare), both of whom have wandered afield of Napoleon's army, the Grimms attempt to find and rescue 11 girls, including one in a red riding hood, who have vanished into a threatening forest from the cursed village of Marbaden.
The brothers have fleeting encounters with a shape-shifting Gingerbread Man -- the cleverest sequence -- Hansel and Gretel and Snow White's evil, apple-bearing queen and quite a lot of contact with a fiendish queen (Monica Bellucci) who lives in a stone tower.
The Grimms' one strong ally is a bewitching hunter named Angelika (Lena Headey).
By its choice of subject, "The Brothers Grimm" fairly begs a family audience unless, of course, it means to depict the brothers and their interestingly difficult lives realistically, which is not the case.
Slapstick and a tone of foolishness fold freely into folk-tale content with menacing appearances by a werewolf, countless shots of creepy-crawlies and graphically and sometimes bloodily disturbing images. A child is swallowed and then digested by a horse.
And yet none of this is funny or ingenious in the way one might expect of Gilliam. The film is clearly not for children, yet it doesn't seem to offer much to teens or adults or even work as a cult item for which it is conversely too tame.
Sometimes the stitching of disparate notions just cancels out them all.
