I may have over-promised a tad when I referred to the upcoming release of "The Huntsman: Winter's War" as 'surely to be the greatest movie ever.' Sadly, it is not.
Through no fault of the lead actors, might I add; specifically the lovely Charlize Theron and the even lovelier Jessica Chastain, who light up the screen with every appearance. I read that Ms. Chastain "had fun" making this picture, which is reason enough for its existence for THIS (admittedly biased) film critic.
In Charlize's case, it is an all-too-brief appearance: the one (and ONLY) original idea in this big studio mish-mash is that it is both a prequel AND a sequel ... I will pause while you digest that concept.
That means that Theron's evil queen Ravenna is featured in the prologue, and after the filmmakers dispense with the entire original Snow White story, "The Huntsman," with a lame "Seven Years Later" inter-title, Ravenna gets to come back at the end to inject some life into the moribund story. [I'm too tired to explain how this is possible, since she died in the original.] In another first in movie history, I can proclaim that a movie suffers from not having Kristen Stewart in it!
For the intervening 90 minutes, the audience must sit through a pastiche of ideas stolen from "The Lord of the Rings" "Game of Thrones" "The Golden Compass" and every recent live-action Disney movie. Does it want to be a comedy? A fantasy? A comedy-fantasy, with sex? I'll let the director and the army of screenwriters fight over that, since they obviously have yet to reach a consensus.
(However, when you are stealing ideas from "The Golden Compass," you are obviously bereft of ideas, and should consider another line of work).
As for the dialogue coaches, I will give them an A for effort. I will not go so far as New York Times critic A.O. Scott, who described the accents as "straight from the Groundskeeper Willie Academy of Dialect Sciences" (burn), but they do go in and out like the waves on the Firth of Forth. Again, I must cite to a superior TV series--in this case "Outlander"--and wonder why this $100 million+ budgeted movie pales in comparison to what I can see on the small screen?
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| Oh yeah, Chris Hemsworth is in it, too. |
