Film aims for a dark retelling of fairy tale, but its star is too lightweight

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Chris Hemsworth as The Huntsman with a cast of A-list Bristish actors as Dwarfs. (CP)

Movie review

Snow White and the Huntsman

• Starring Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron
• Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne
• PG
• 127 minutes
• Three stars out of five

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Kristen Stewart as Snow White. (POSTMEDIA)

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Charlize Theron as Ravenna. (CP)

The second Snow White movie to come out in the past few months, Snow White and the Huntsman is a movie deadly serious about its source material, in contrast to the snickering burlesque that was Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror.

Serious is good, or at least better. Where Mirror Mirror could be easily forgotten minutes after seeing it, this film by first-time feature director Rupert Sanders is aiming to create a rich mythological environment for the tale. This is Brothers Grimm by way of Lord of the Rings.

Hence the screenplay by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini skews from Disney's benign, kiddie-friendly version in interesting ways, most notably in its wicked queen, who comes to the tale with a back story that makes for a tantalizing parallel with the heroine.

Ravenna (Charlize Theron) insinuates herself in the castle of a grieving, widowed king and usurps his throne. The king's beloved, pale-skinned, raven-tressed daughter Snow White is imprisoned in a tower, growing up to become, well, Kristen Stewart.

Ravenna maintains her youthful beauty in a kind of ritual that owes more to Elizabeth Bathory than Brothers Grimm: If she spots a wrinkle, she sucks the life force from any handy maidens. Likewise, her presence in the kingdom causes poverty and blight in the surrounding villages. Not that she's apologizing. "I will give this wretched world the Queen it deserves," she says at one point.

When the molten magic mirror (a supernatural entity that recalls Terminator's T-1000) suggests Snow White's heart would give the queen youthful immortality, Snow is obliged to escape the castle and take refuge in the Dark Forest, a place of hallucinogenic horror.

Ravenna enlists the aid of the huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), a drunken widower, to navigate the forest with her creepy albino brother/henchman (Sam Spruell), Soon, both Snow White and the huntsman are on the run, finding themselves in the company of seven dwarfs (a smorgasbord of excellent English character actors including Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Toby Jones, Ray Winstone and Eddie Marsan, all digitally shrunken, LOTR-style). Meanwhile, among the Queen's men hunting for the fugitive princess is William (Sam Claflin), Snow's childhood crush, now grown up to be the kind of archer who wouldn't be out of place among The Avengers.

The movie's visuals are often quite wonderful. Where Mirror Mirror was hamstrung by its sterile digital environment, this movie's use of nature imagery is altogether more sumptuous and appropriate to the story.

Also, you've got to hand it to Charlize Theron: she goes for it, reciting well-worn lines such as "Mirror, mirror on the wall" with all the gravitas she can muster, which is considerable.

Pacing is a problem. Director Sanders was recruited from the realm of commercials, and the movie's 124-minute running time has the kind of lags one might expect from a guy who usually delivers his product 60 seconds at a time.

The other weakness of the movie is Stewart, who was evidently cast on her success in that exercise in modern-day myth-making, Twilight. Her look is wrong: Stewart is lovely enough to contemporary eyes, but she hardly epitomizes the classical kind of beauty the role demands. And in her Henry V moment, when she is obliged to rally villagers against the queen, her emotional pitch is more reminiscent of a teen tantrum.

When it came to casting "the fairest of them all" with a currently hot movie star, the producers of this film mistakenly believed them to be the same thing.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Snow White and the Huntsman:

Snow White and the Huntsman reinvents the legendary story in a film of astonishing beauty and imagination.

-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

I resisted this derivative mishmash of classic fairy tale and modern epic fantasy for as long as I could, but ultimately it swept me up into its geeky but manly embrace and carried me away on a white charger.

-- Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

Snow White and the Huntsman never quite delivers on its promise -- a dark retelling of the fairy tale in which women hold the true power, good and evil -- but it certainly is an attractive misfire.

-- Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

This Snow White is one of those revisionist fairy tales in which the princess takes control of her own destiny. A different actress might have been able to sell that, but Kristen Stewart can't.

-- Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times

A strong visual style tussles with flaccid storytelling in this ambitious retelling of Grimm. It won't exactly have Walt Disney spinning in his secret ice chamber, but you may wish they spent more time worrying about what exactly the film is than who it's for.

-- Dan Jolin, Empire Magazine

It turns into a clangy medieval epic, full of random woodland monsters and battles, and it begins to lose the pulse of its fairy-tale mystique. It's like watching Clash of the Titans IV: Revenge of the Blood Apple.

-- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

-- Compiled by Postmedia News

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 1, 2012 D1