The Mirror Also Knew This Was Crap

Snow White’s Huntsman should have kept hunting for a better movie  

Hope you've gone out to the lobby to get yourselves a snack, because your favorite film critic is back with another review.  Also, one of these days, Jeremy may actually like a movie.  That will be fun to see.

So, not long ago, I attended a screening of the new motion picture "Snow White And The Huntsman."  It's the new epic telling of the fairy tale of roughly the same name.   The non-spoiler portion of my review is as follows:  Don't See This Movie.  

SPOILER ALERT!  If you're concerned about that sort of thing, stop reading now, but come back tomorrow!

This movie stars Kristen Stewart in a non-vampire role where she still gets to sleepwalk through her part without ever changing facial expression.  (Remind You Of Anyone?)  She plays Snow White whose father is killed by the evil queen and her army of glass shards.  I'm not making that up.   Snow escaped from the castle and is tracked in the dark forest by the unnamed "Huntsman" who I shall refer to as Westley, because the whole dark forest thing (and at least 41.5% of the rest of the movie) is lifted pretty directly from The Princess Bride.  After Westley decides he likes Snow, he goes on the run with her and they spend the next hour of our lives being hunted down by the Queen's magical army no fewer than four times, because three apparently wasn't enough to drive the point home.  Snow discovers that the animals and some dwarfs love her and the whole poison apple thing happens, Westley kisses her to wake her up (since she was only "Mostly Dead") and they gather an army to storm the castle.  Snow confronts the evil queen in her magical chamber of evil with the line "My name is Snow White.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die."  Or at least she should have. 

Here's a brief list of what's wrong with this movie:

• The Mirror on the wall actually melts down and creates a sort of statue person (who is NOT voiced by James Earl Jones...huge casting mistake) in a special effect we haven't seen since Terminator 2.
  
• Snow escapes the castle with nothing but a nail, yet four battle scenes later, she's wearing a snuggly-looking winter coat.
  
• A mystical 83-point buck decrees Snow to be the real princess in a scene stolen from The Matrix when Neo meets the Oracle.  Anything that reminds us of Keanu Reeves can't be a good thing.
  
• Snow's friend joins the Queen's army as a double-agent archer, seemingly the only archer in the search party.  When a village is set on fire with flaming arrows, our boy has already switched sides.  Who's shooting all these arrows, and why has nobody noticed that The Archer isn't one of them?
  
  
• The tunnel Snow used to escape the castle is a full 50 feet above the water on the side of a cliff, yet that's the entrance the dwarfs use to get back in. 
  
• And this one is the worst for me.  Snow and Westley are wandering through the dark forest when OUT OF FREAKING NOWHERE, Westley stops everything to show Snow how to properly kill somebody with a dagger, and they move on.  Gee...we're 35 minutes into the movie, and I now know precisely how the evil queen is going to die.  I'm all for foreshadowing, but this was terrible. 
  
  

So, in a nutshell, this film was visually amazing with scenes and costumes and action scenes to spare.  However, that's not quite enough to make up for the pacing (At least 30 minutes too long), baffling plot twists, lack of originality, and some questionable acting performances (Charlize Theron as the Evil Queen isn't bad when she's not too far over the top).  This film killed it at the box office this weekend due to a brilliant marketing campaign, but it won't stay up there for long.

This has been another edition of Jeremy Is In The Theatre.