The Brothers Grimm

Two brothers, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, (Will and Jacob Grimm) hunt down demons and witches.  They go from town to town, charging the villagers for their services. Only in reality they are phonies. They have two fellow con artists that pretend to be whichever supernatural creature Will comes up with.  So the four of them are making pretty good money, and are happy, except for Jacob. He isn't happy because he used to a be a scholar. He used to study fairy tales and whatnot and he's not happy about the fact that everything is made up. 

When they are relaxing in a German town they have just 'liberated' from a witch, they are captured by the French, who have invaded Germany. The French General, Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce), knows that these people are con artists and is sending them to a small town where 10 girls have gone missing, because there must be other con artists in the forests surrounding the town and he wants the brothers to unmask them.

Only when they arrive Jacob realizes that it is a real fairy tale. Will doesn't believe him, or doesn't want to believe him, but Jacob is insistent. According to the stories, there was a queen (Monica Bellucci) that was absolutely obsessed with herself and on the day of her wedding a plague came and struck the area. The queen built herself into a tower with no entrance so that the plague couldn't affect her. Only she didn't realize that it was airborne, so she dies anyways. Jacob is convinced she isn't dead, that she found a way to stay alive and now she is kidnapping young girls.

Jacob makes into the tower to see that he was right. Only her spell only granted eternal life, not eternal beauty, so now her henchman, and the forest itself, are kidnapping young girls so she can use their beauty so she can become beautiful once again.

After much arguing Will believes in his brother so he gives up his life so that Jacob can defeat the queen. He does this by smashing her mirror and after the tower is destroyed he wakes up the children and Will is miraculously back alive.

This movie was lousy. It was tacky and cheesy and just crappy. After the first ten minuets I knew it was bad. It was just so unbelievable and bad. The script was bad, the directing was bad, acting was bad, everything was bad. We are in Europe and some people are missing accents completely, some have such thick accents I didn't understand a single word they were saying and some have such fake accents that it was just unbearable to watch. 

And the queen made no sense. It was as if they just picked a random bad guy and shoved her in the story. It didn't seem that integral to the story. How did she build a tower with no entrance and manage to get in? How did she get food? Water? How did she control the trees? The birds? It made no sense.

But the thing that made the least sense is the tagline for the movie: 'Eliminating evil since 1812'. The movie was set in 1795! How did they get 1812? That's just a dumb thing to tack on to the rest of the dumb things that are in this movie.

Grade: 4/10