Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

I knew Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters was going to be bad.  I kind of wanted it to be bad.  I love bad movies.  My expectations going into the movie were pretty low.  Good news!  They were (very slightly) exceeded.  It could have been worse.  It could have been Conan the Barbarian.  IT COULD HAVE BEEN VAN HELSING!  (side note: I absolutely hated Van Helsing).  Anywhoodle, I'm disappointed that the idea here is a good one (Hansel and Gretel grow up to be witch hunters) but the execution was severely lacking.

There are some complaints I'd like to share and they aren't even about the lack of story or plot or decent dialogue.   I was going to complain about some of the historical inaccuracies like a crank-operated defibrillator, and the use of a Gatling gun but then they just seem so obvious.  Oh and then there's the time that Gretel refers to the local villagers as hillbillies.  That was fun.  But I think my real disappointment was with the action.  It was fast, edited strangely, and I missed a lot of it due to lame camera work.  Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was a terrible film too but at least the got they action right.

What worked?  Well, in some weird way, I think Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton were just fine as our witch-killing heroes.  Of course I'm biased in that I really like both actors.  And they're professionals.  They seemed to be having fun with some really terrible material so good for them.

The other thing that was cool that they didn't spend enough time with was the witches.  There's a whole gathering of witches and each of them looked very different and very cool.  They could have spent some time with these ladies by introducing them and their powers to us.  The movie claims that witches can't physically hide the effects of working with dark magic.  Each witch had some different stuff going on and I wanted to know if it had something to do with their gifts or the type of magic they practiced.  At a running time of 88 minutes (also a blessing), they could have added in some more story with the witches.