"The Curse of Hunger for Crawling Things - I f**king hate that one!"Hansel and Gretel is nothing more than a daft, fun, empty-headed high-concept Friday-night popcorn flick, and on that level it delivers. Constantly on the move, after a brief set-up of the fairy tale we all know and an excellent 3D-animated title montage, Renner and Arterton make for stoic leads (ridiculously straight-faced at times) as the grown-up witch hunters, and Famke Janssen chews the scenery wonderfully as their main adversary. There is plenty of (3D) bang for your buck, only let down by some occasionally cheap-looking CG splatter. This incarnation of witches as Evil Dead-style possessed creatures works very well, and there are some neat twists on the traditional story - there is even some nice King Kong-inspired business with a troll. The amount of violence meted out to Gretel is at times disturbing - at one point, Gretel suffers a real kicking at the hands of a group of men whilst Hansel gets off with a local girl in a pool! In the hands of a Hollywood hack this film would have been dreadful, but thankfully Tommy Wirkola manages to imbue the film with some of the wit and energy that made Dead Snow so enjoyable, and he certainly proves here (more than once) that he can make a visceral and dynamic action scene way beyond those seen in most standard action films.
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