by Leah Schroeder ’13

Once upon a time, I went to see a movie, but found myself more entertained by the enthusiastic six-year-old behind me and the mysterious employee who would periodically wander the theater. There was a movie playing, but, not unlike Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb trail, it was going nowhere.

Tommy Wirkola’s “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” couldn’t decide if it was a parody, horror film, action film or drama, and it failed at being any of them. It couldn’t even pick a logical time frame, with Hansel and Gretel switching off using cross-bows and machine guns.  They were devices of the duo’s own design, but they were out of place in a town reminiscent of the middle ages.

The movie portrays Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) employing the “skills” they learned since their childhood encounter with a witch to hunt and destroy another coven threatening the town of Augsburg.

And, dare I say it, they are really bad at their job. For professional witch hunters, they seem to have no practical ability to take down a witch. Every encounter with a witch starts with Hansel and Gretel’s humiliation and usually ends with the witch escaping.

In her portrayal of Gretel, Arterton was torn between being a pansy wallowing about her lost childhood and a tough-as-nails witch hunter, and both portrayals were fatally flawed. I’m at a loss to understand why Renner, who has had success in the action genre including “The Avengers” and “The Bourne Legacy,” signed onto this film, having read the poor script and surely knowing that he was going to look like such an incapable, unfocused jerk and goof-ball.

Everything about the movie was cliché, including the gratuitous one-liner about the porridge being not too hot or too cold, but just right. The overabundance of gore might have been the attempt to help it appeal to an older audience, but it was fake and overdramatic. It came across as a massive time-filler, like there unsurprisingly wasn’t enough content to make a movie without adding random, illogical violence to fill it out. I couldn’t have cared less about what happened, which is why I spent the last 45 minutes of “Hansel and Gretel” watching the employee and his red light rather than the action on the screen. In all honesty, my dad said it best, it was just stupid.