Snow White and the Huntsman

2012 action fairy tale

Rating: 9/20 (Abbey: 10/20)

Plot: Snow White's mom dies, and her dad, the king, marries the next woman he meets. Unfortunately, it turns out she's terrible at sex, and on their wedding night, she stabs him with the kind of dagger you can only find in movies like this. Snow White is thrown into a tower until she reaches an age where grown men can legally drool over her, and she eventually escapes into some creepy forest. The evil queen sends her brother and Thor out to fetch her. Then--dwarves!

This movie is stupid and poorly written, but that's not its greatest offense. No, it's greatest offense is that it's really dull. It retains this identical stilted atmosphere for the duration, the movie having about as many different tones as star Kristen Stewart has facial expressions. It makes for a bloated, lumbering cinematic experience. It's a twisted fairy tale that lacks color and anything that would make it fun unless herky-jerky action sequences that run together and don't make a lot of sense is your idea of fun. It's hard to tell whether the audience for this is young adults or just regular adults, but I can't imagine people of any age watching this and having any interest in it. It certainly didn't take me long to lose interest in what was going on.

A lot of that is that none of the characters are interesting. They all speak like characters created by a person who skimmed a Writing Fantasy Movie Scripts for Dummies book. Kristen Stewart just might be incapable of playing an interesting character. Chris Hemsworth leans on physical prowess, an accent that doesn't make much sense although it's the sort of thing the ladies like, and a pretty boy image, but he brings absolutely nothing engaging to this huntsman character. There are a bunch of little fellows--seven of them, as a matter of fact--but they're not even really little people, just boring regular-sized guys made small with the black magic of special effects. I didn't like them, and that's even with shane-movies favorite Toby Jones playing one of them. And then there's Charlize Theron who is surprisingly really awful. She reminded me of Sharon Stone in Catwoman, and I don't mean that in a good way. She's over-the-top, but it's not really in a way that makes the character any kind of memorable villainess or anything. She has stupid things to say, takes baths in milk for reasons that either aren't explained or reasons I missed because I wasn't really paying enough attention, and has conversations with a gong for some reason. I know, I know. It's not a gong. It's a computer-animated gong that does nothing but remind you of Terminator 2, a movie that came out 25 years ago.

The best thing about movie is the evil queen's brother's hair.


I really hated this movie and will not be seeing the sequel.

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