Becky's Review of The Brother's Grimm

"I command you to put me in a better movie."

Have you ever heard of the quote, "If you have to do something, do it all the way, or don't do it at all"? If I had one piece of advice to give to director Terry Gilliam, it would be this. His movie, The Brother's Grimm, starts out with a great concept, "What if the authors of Grimm's fairytales were actually charlatans who stole money from neighboring towns in Germany with their stories and setups of fancy and flight, until one day they actually encounter an actual case where their stories are true?" Sounds great in concept, but, unfortunately for this movie, poor in execution.

The Brother's Grimm is a mismatch of weirdness, romance, brotherly love, history, and fantasy. It has some weirdness, but doesn't carry through with it, like Tim Burton does. It only has specks of weirdness here and there. It has some romance, but only for about 15 seconds. Brotherly love ... a lot of that (which is the only watchable part of the movie). Heath Ledger and Matt Damon play well off each other. History ... this movie shows some of what was happening at the time the Grimm brother's existed, including the French occupation of Germany, but not a whole lot. The French in this movie are portrayed as idiots and I honestly could not see how they could have taken over Germany with their intellect. And finally ... fantasy. It has fantasy, but only a bunch of specks of fantasy put together in one whole movie. We see a lot of the Queen in the previews, but she really doesn't appear that much in the movie till the end. We see Little Red Riding, the Ginger Bread man, the Wolf, the glass slippers, Hansel and Gretel, but that's really all there is, and we only see glimpses of them on screen for about 30 seconds... nothing else. The movie kept making me question ... why was that in there? Most of the movie is the Brother's Grimm trying to avoid the French army from kidnapping them and torturing them for their charlatan ways. No offense to the director, but BORING!

This movie could have been a good movie, but the director should have stick with one theme. The Brother's Grimm either should have been a historical take on the French occupation of Germany with the Brother's Grimm using their active imaginations to get them out of their hum-drum existence, or a story of two brothers who briefly (and I mean briefly .. this should take 5-10 minutes of the movie) are in the real world, and THEN are trapped in a fantasy land of fairytales. Again, this movie is interesting in concept ... bad in execution.