Director Terry Gilliam’s first film since 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an ambitious work that never quite gels. Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are those famous 18th-century German folklorists. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger (who also penned the US Ring movies and the current Skeleton Key) has concocted a fictional back-story for the duo (actually trained in the law) as roaming charlatans, pretend witch-busters, forced to confront the truly supernatural. Weaving in motifs from “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Rapunzel,” and assorted grotesqueries, Gilliam seems to be trying to create both a haunting fantasy and a mildly goofy comedy. A darker Princess Bride might be a very rough analogy, but that had a much better screenplay. Here, the romance is perfunctory, and what’s meant to be humorous is simply weird, like a lesser sketch from Gilliam’s old Monty Python troupe. Jonathan Pryce plays the villain (a henchman for Napoleon) with an odd, pseudo-French accent, for example. Damon wavers between British and American English, and some of the dialogue also detracts from the period feel.
viewed 8/27/05; reviewed 8/29/05
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