AmateurMovieReviews.com

Prior to sitting down to watch The Brother's Grimm, I knew that it had been a box office bomb and that many critics and casual viewers alike thought it was a bad movie. But I am a big fan of both Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, so I wanted to at least give this movie a chance. I seized the opportunity when my local video store offered $1 rentals last week. Unfortunately, even that proved too much to pay for this turkey of a film!

The Brothers Grimm starts out promisingly enough. We get an establishing scene of Jakob and Wilhelm as youngsters and see that Jakob once sold the family cow for a handful of magic beans instead of getting money to purchase medicine for his deathly ill sister.

We then flash forward several years later to a time when Jake (Heath Ledger) and Will (Matt Damon) are in their early twenties. The Brothers Grimm are renowned throughout Germany, not as storytellers, but as saviors. What they do is go into small towns that are having mysterious problems and "cleanse" the towns of the supernatural forces (usually witches) that are causing the problems. Apparently, the brothers learned long ago that it was easy to bilk superstitious peasants out of their money by putting on an elaborate show to make the peasants believe that they actually were being haunted by a witch.

I thought that twist was actually pretty clever, and wished the main plot had stuck to that particular storyline. But that's not how it went at all. Instead, the brothers get arrested as con artists and face severe punishment. In order to save themselves, they must help investigate the mysterious disappearances of several young children in another village.

During the course of their investigation, they come across some indications that the surrounding forest may truly be enchanted. Jake, the one who traded for magic beans as a young boy, believes wholeheartedly that they are up against honest to goodness black magic. Will, the one who orchestrated most of the cons the brothers pulled off, doesn't believe it for a second. The rest of the movie then deals with Jake and Will trying to find out what really happened to the children and then trying to save them before it's too late.

I thought The Brothers Grimm was a pretty bad movie. The whole thing was very uneven, and it seemed like the filmmakers couldn't decide what tone they wanted to take. At times, it was funny (or at least it attempted to be funny), and at other times, it was dark and brooding -- almost scary. These switches were a bit hard to follow, and as a viewer, I didn't know which parts I was supposed to take seriously and which ones were meant to be the opposite.

As I mentioned above, I didn't like the plot at all. I really feel that this would have been a much more interesting film if director Terry Gilliam and screenwriter Ehren Kruger had chosen to follow the Grimms as con artists angle throughout the whole thing. But because of the path the plot did go down, it was necessary to bring in additional (and completely annoying) characters, such as Cavaldi (played by Peter Stormare). Stormare's character was clearly suppoed to provide comic relief, but I didn't find him the least bit amusing. I cringed every time he appeared on the screen and then squirmed uncomfortably until the scene finally ended. I thought Stormare was just terrible in this!

Moreover, I was disappointed by the performances of both Damon and Ledger. They've both done amazing work in the past and are commonly referred to as two of the best young actors of this generation. However, their talents never had a chance to shine through in The Brothers Grimm, and I spent a lot of time wondering why they ever agreed to take on such a project as this.

Overall, there's nothing I can find in The Brothers Grimm to recommend it. It doesn't know which genre it wants to belong to, the acting by all the major characters is subpar, and the plot is boring and hard to follow. Save your money (even if it is just a dollar) and avoid this bomb!