nce upon a time, there were two brothers, Will (Damon) and Jacob (Ledger), who were known throughout the countryside as the Grimm Brothers. They were renowned for their powers to chase away demons, witches and banshees—all for a price, of course. The trouble is, they stage their dramatic exorcisms and then hightail it out of town until they find their next scam.
Will is the handsome one, always taking advantage of the few maidens he meets along the way, while Jacob is the bookish one, who chronicles the stories of the villagers along the way.
Just at their tails from village to village are French soldiers who are trying to stop the charlatans. The Napoleonic autocrat who rules the area, Delatombe (Pryce), has his henchmen, led by a torture expert named Cavaldi (Stormare), catch the two brothers because he has an assignment for them. Delatombe believes that another scam is going on in the small village of Marbaden, and everyone there thinks the Enchanted Forest nearby is cursed. He sends the brothers with Cavaldi to solve the mystery of why young maidens have disappeared.
Young red riding hood gets chased by a wolf, Greta disappears while walking with Hans and looking for a gingerbread house—many of the stories sound a bit familiar and obviously become the classic fairytales that we all have been told as kids.
The brothers need a guide, and the only one seems to be a cursed trapper named Angelika (Headey), who kisses frogs to find her way through the forest where the trees seem to constantly move. Angelika's two sisters are among the disappeared girls and her father disappeared around a lone tower that stands in the center of the forest. That's where a vain Queen (Bellucci) holed herself up during the great plague and is said to still live after 500 years.
Once upon a time is enough
Terry Gilliam is a fantastically warped director with a delightful off-beat approach to movies, with stories like 12 Monkeys, Brazil, Jabberwocky and Time Bandits under his belt. He has joked that this $80 million big-budgeted film is his "sell-out" movie because he uses big Hollywood stars and more money than he's ever dreamed of having for a film, but somehow it's neither a sell-out nor is it a masterpiece that one might expect.
Sure, there are a few Gilliam-isms that are expected, like the toothless crones and crooked characters that he dredges up in his Monty Python movies. There are also quite absurd moments where the whole cast seems to be performing in a different movie, or ready to burst out laughing, as if they were in a Flying Circus sketch.
Even though the story seems to have many more fanciful characters than in any other Gilliam project, it seems like some of his other works (I'm thinking The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) contains more interesting creatures to watch. The computer graphic wolf is almost laughable, and the moving trees are sometimes good. In fact, when the effects are good, they're very very good, when they are bad, they're horrid.
Gilliam obviously cast the Hollywood hunks in roles that are opposite from what anyone else would cast them in. Damon is the leading swashbuckler, confident and sexy, while Ledger plays the bookish, quiet dweeb. Stormare as the torturer has the most fun in scene-chewing, and his character breaks out of the one-dimensionality it may have seemed on the page.
Bellucci as the Queen is unrecognizable with her skull-like face and long fingernails, but she does show her beauty at times, too. It's unfortunate she's not in the film more, and there's a shard of glass that remains at the end that could allow her to have her own spin-off.
The references to fairytale classics touch on Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, the Frog Prince, Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel and many more obscure frightening stories, but it's tough to tell if Gilliam meant it to really be scary, or really be a spoof, or really be an adventure. There's too much kissing for it to be a family film to take the kids (despite Gilliam's goal for that), there's too much silliness for it to be considered a good dramatic adventure. And, because of all that, it lacks the genius of Gilliam's past works.
