Movie Review – The Huntsman by Leia Shaw

Another movie review from yours truly! After the roaring success of my rambling, nonsensical movie review of The Avengers a couple weeks ago, I figured I’d entertain you with even more rubbish! You’re welcome.

Hubby forced me to see Snow White and the Huntsman this weekend. I was skeptical because I’m not a Kristin Stewart fan but Chris Hemsworth (Thor, with the sexiest biceps ever) was in it so I figured either way I had some eye candy to go along with my real candy and popcorn. So here’s my review.

Plot: So we start with a loving queen who sees a rose in winter and decides she wants a baby. Snow White is born and becomes the apple of the kingdom’s eye at age 7. Then, in a series of narrated tragic events, her whole family dies and she’s stuck with an evil step-mother (aren’t they all?) and locked up in the north tower (aren’t they all?).

Fast forward a decade or so. Ravena’s evil magic has ravaged the land and everyone hates her, except for her creepy as hell brother who looks like an albino version of Moe from the Three Stooges and apparently has no balls because he lets his sister walk all over him.

Ravena spends her days sucking the youth out of various victims to stay young and taking milk baths – you know, the usual queenly tasks. She consults her magic mirror (which isn’t a mirror at all, it’s this gold goo with a voice like Denzel Washington) obsessively to make sure she’s the “fairest in the land.” One day Goldie says “Ravenna, you got beat out, bitch. Snow White’s what’s up now.”

She wigs out (Vanity, thy name is Ravena) and demands Snow’s beating heart – to eat, or dance around, or burn, I’m not sure. But apparently some prophecy that comes out of nowhere says Snow’s heart is the secret to eternal youth. With the help of some birds, Snow escapes the tower and runs and swims and rides a random horse that just happened to be in the right place at the right time and runs some more then ends up in the Dark Forest.

Ravenna is all like “Get me that bitch so I can crush her heart even though I’ve been keeping her alive for no good reason and could have, at any time, killed her.” Hindsight’s twenty twenty, isn’t it, Your Evilness? Anyway, in comes Chris Wensworth. Whoo-hoo! He’s all rugged and handsome with his scruffy beard and long blonde locks. So he lost his wife and spends his days drowning his sorrows with alcohol and bar fights. Ravenna convinces him, by a false bribe a two year old could see through, to go to the Dark Forest to hunt down Snow White.

So the Huntsman and Moe and a few minions gallop to the edge of the forest. He finds her in, like, three seconds flat, which leads me to my main point. Snow White is stupid. Or at least not very special. The next hour of the movie leans heavily on this random prophecy that she’s to be the salvation of their land. But there is literally nothing special about her. I think they were counting on her beauty to carry the film, but she’s not even that pretty! I could forgive that if she had some redeeming qualities, but she doesn’t. She’s not strong or a good fighter or funny or resourceful or smart. The only think that’s remarkably interesting about her is that she spent most of her life in a prison cell. But she’s not even pale enough to believe it!

So everyone is on Snow White’s side because she’s so…nothing, but whatever. They travel and fight bad guys and finally run into the dwarves. They’re funny-looking, I’ll give you that. But I couldn’t understand a damn thing they said. Were they speaking English? I have no idea. I couldn’t decide if they were supposed to be the comic relief or not, but believe me, by this point I was begging for some relief, comedy or otherwise.

It dragged in the middle – some walking in a magical forest with gratuitous use of CGI effects. More prophecy shit. Something about a stag that didn’t make any sense at all. I can’t exactly remember because I was too busy looking pictures of cats saying funny misspelled words on facebook. Yes, it was that boring.

Meanwhile, Ravena and bro get more and more pissed they can’t find her. So she does some crazy ass magic to kill Snow that leaves her morphing from a bunch of dead ravens into her Queen form. Oh. Aha moment! Ravena. Like ravens. Hmm. Still doesn’t redeem the movie.

Anyway, Snow dies. They bring her body to the hide-out of the rebels and she lays all dressed up in a room looking dead. It reminded me a lot of the latest Twilight movie and I decided Kristin Stewart is pretty good at laying around looking dead. More about that in the acting section of the review. Anyway, the Huntsman kisses her. She wakes up then gives a rousing speech in varying degrees of British accent proficiency about why they should fight Ravena.

Unifying, charging castle, fighting, and finally the final show-down between Snow and Ravena. I won’t give away the ending except to say it was very anti-climactic. Makes you want to spend $12 to see the movie, doesn’t it?

Acting: Chis Hemsworth was awesome. He had depth and humor and all those other adjectives reviewers use to describe good acting. My only issue was the serious lack of bicep footage. Charlize Theron was brilliant as an evil Queen and way prettier than Kristin Stewart, I might add, even covered in what looked like elmer’s glue. Speaking of Kristin Stewart, I hated her in Twilight. Though she was a smidgeon better in this, it wasn’t enough to make me like the movie or the character. The best scene in the movie was while she was dead. Harsh but true.

Overall I give this movie a thumbs down. That being said, other people seemed to like it. Maybe you would too.

 

Filed under: romance