This was one of the films that I recommended many moons ago in my Summer 2012 preview post, and back then I was confident that Snow White and The Huntsman was going to be an awesome, kick-ass movie. From the producer of Tim Burton’s recent re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland, my hopes were high for oddness and violence. The trailer made it look like that. In reality, the trailer kind of lies. Sure, ass-kicking occurs at certain points in the film, but no where near as much as I expected. In reality Kristen ‘doom and gloom’ Stewart’s Snow White is just as much of a defenceless twit as I was expecting her to be, only donning her chain-mail towards the end. For the majority of the film she relies on the Huntsman, childhood friend William and a pack of dwarves to protect her. I wanted her to protect herself. Alas, it was not really so.
The story is basically a twist on the classic Snow White fairytale (if you hadn’t already guessed that), where the Huntsman originally sent to kill the young girl actually becomes her mentor, protector and eventually falls in love with her. The twist was interesting, mostly because the Huntsman was by far the most interesting and watch-able character in the film. Chris Hemsworth does a very good job of making his Huntsman a tortured yet funny man, and so his presence in the entirety of the story is welcome. And as much as I really wanted to hate her, especially since she wasn’t as ass-kicking as I wanted, Kristen Stewart did do a good job as Snow White. But then I have low expectations of the girl, who generally just annoys me. However, when Stewart is outside of the Twi-shite universe, she can actually act. And she is annoyingly quite beautiful to look at. All the dwarves did a superb job as well (think more LotR and less Disney Snow White), especially since all the actors were pretty tall lads in reality. Ray Winston as a dwarf…just genius really. He should get his own feature film.
So what was my problem with the whole thing then? Apart from the film not having enough violence and general action (yes, I know I’m a bit too happy slappy), it was a film that had too many drastic high points and low points. And the low points were pretty low. I mean, really low. I felt like I was excited and entertained one minute, and then ridiculous bored the next. It was a shame, because the high points of the film were very good and if the entire thing had been like these moments then this could have been one of my films of the summer. There was one particular scene that stands out in my memory as making me despair beyond belief; the ‘sanctuary’ scene. Usually I like cute animals in magical settings, but this wasn’t what I went to this film expecting. And thus it just felt really lame. And I wanted the cute animals to all die.
Mad props go to Charlize Theron’s evil queen though. Damn, that girl knows how to be a massively good-looking-but-bad-ass bitch. More of that and less of the lame bunnies please. Long live villainous characters.
TheReelThingRises 