Poor by design, Snow
White and the Huntsman lives and dies by taking its utterly preposterous
premise in earnest. If the idea of
a gritty, edgy adult-oriented Snow White sounds like a good time at the movies,
there was a delightfully stupid, trashy one made for television in the nineties
called Snow White: A Tale of Terror
that, while certainly awful, wasn't an overlong generic high fantasy mess. The sight of the famous singing birds
guiding Snow White through a dark, bloody keep would play best as a Saturday
Night Live sketch. Instead, the
film insists that you take this ridiculousness very seriously. Snow White: The Cynical Years? Is this what Hollywood has come to?
The story barely differentiates itself from the original Disney film that
everyone is already so familiar with.
The evil queen (Charlize Theron, performing like she really IS in an SNL
skit) wants to be the fairest of them all but is challenged by the beauty of
Snow White (played wonderfully as a child by Raffey Cassidy, and then later by
Kristen Stewart). Snow White
escapes the clutches of the queen's stronghold and is hunted down by the
titular Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), and just so all tension is eliminated, he
immediately sides with Snow White about two minutes after being hired. And yes, there are dwarves, and yes,
their size is the only thing in the film played for comedy, but wait there's
more, they're played by the film's most respectable actors receiving the most
disrespectful paychecks of their careers "“ Toby Jones! Ian McShane! Eddie
Marsan! Bob Hoskins! Ray Winstone!
Has great talent ever been wasted on less?
Sure, the movie looks decent enough and the action is
semi-comprehensible, but generically pretty can be found in a Lisa Frank
calendar. At two hours that seem
like more, Snow White and the Huntsman
overstays its welcome and takes itself more seriously than it deserves to. Perhaps it could have acknowledged the
latent absurdity of its concept were it headed by Tarsem Singh, inappropriately
matched for this year's other Snow White adaptation, Mirror Mirror. Not
only would the film's visuals have blossomed under his eye, but it may have
embraced the nonsense. As it
stands, it's Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel.
