The Huntsman: Winter’s War | Film Review

Way, way back in 1812, The Brothers Grimm first introduced the characters of Snow White, her cruel stepmother, the huntsman, the love-struck prince, the dwarves, and the magic mirror to the world in their first collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  The past 200+ years have seen many retellings and interpretations of the classic tale – animated, live action, big screen, small screen, books, comics, set in the past, set in the present – all to varying degrees of success.  The tale certainly deserves the moniker “timeless”.  I think we can all agree that the most beloved and referenced version remains the 1936 classic animated Disney film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.  It is a magical movie that still holds up well today and continues to enchant audiences both young and old.

Bringing a story to the big screen that has been told countless times before can be a tricky business.  Many will flock to see it because, like the tale itself, its themes are timeless, namely that good can overcome almost all evils and, in the end, love triumphs over all.  As an audience, most of us eat that kind of stuff up with spoons in both hands.  However, in a world where we are bombarded from all sides by media that the Brothers Grimm could never have imagined, there are many who will just see it as a story they’ve seen many times before and give it a pass based on just that.  There is too much other stuff out there waiting to snatch our attention, and dollars, away.  The trick for filmmakers – and storytellers in general – is to discover that fine balance of being respectful to the heart of the material while at the same time putting a fresh spin on it that will attract the more dismissive cinemagoer, and give the rest of us a fresh take on some beloved characters.

In 2012, director Rupert Sanders and his team of writers offered up their own version of the tale with “Snow White and the Huntsman”.  What they went for was quite bold, practically eliminating one of the classic tale’s main elements – the love story – in favor of a plotline that more resembled a buddy picture, having Snow White join forces with the hunky Huntsman, initially sent to rip her heart out.  The Huntsman went from being a minor character in the original story to the title role on marquees around the world, and Snow White went from damsel in distress to warrior queen, fitted out in shiny armor all her own and leading the charge in the film’s climactic battle scene.  It still had dwarves, a magic mirror, the evil stepmother, a poisoned apple, the love-struck prince, and all the other trappings we know so well, and I think it was a great fantasy-adventure romp.  The story moved fast and smoothly, the casting was dead-on, I cared for the characters, and the special effects artists and production designers created a world and images that were breathtaking.

Now, here we are four years on and the next entry in the series “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” is preparing to storm theaters across North America.  A few of the players from the original are back, and a lot of them aren’t.  Kristen Stewart is obviously the most noticeable absence.  Director Rupert Sanders is also one of the missing, and the reins have been handed over to first time feature director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, the visual effects supervisor on the first film.  So, what do we end up with here exactly?  Is “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” a worthy successor to a fine first-entry, or does it just leave one feeling left out in the cold?

The movie starts as a prequel, showing the evil queen Raveena (Charlize Theron) with another King she chose to screw up royally, long before she got her talon-tipped fingertips into Snow White’s papa.  Pretty much the same thing happens, and Raveena is soon lording over another unlucky kingdom of peasants and vassals.  At her side is her dear sister Freya (Emily Blunt), a sweet and  kind soul who is unluckily in love with a young man who is already promised to another.  After a horrifying tragedy, Freya’s spirit is crushed and she decides that there is no place in her heart, or any other part of her body, for love and other such nonsense.  Having the power to create, control, and manipulate snow and ice (it just pops up out of nowhere with the vaguest of explanations), she heads off to establish a kingdom of her own, complete with a towering ice palace.  Sound familiar?  Of course it does.  And I’ll warn you now, that dang song will be popping up in your head more than once during the two hours you may choose to devote to this, and will probably be floating around inside your noggin for quite a bit after.

It isn’t long before Freya is taking children from the surrounding lands and bringing them to her new abode.  Upon arriving, she tells them that she hasn’t really torn them from their loved ones and forced them there against their will.  She is delivering them into a world where feelings are forbidden, and they should be thankful.  Her new followers – because it is essentially a cult that she has built up around her, not a kingdom – have just two things to do: follow her every order and train their butts off to become her loyal Huntsmen.

Cue the entry of you-know-who.  Well, his younger version to be exact.  And his name is Brighton, but everyone usually refers to him as Huntsman, so I’ll stick with that.  I actually had to scour the Internet to find his character’s real name, as I could not recall it even after seeing the movie.  Oh well, I am getting older.  Maybe that’s why?

Okay, where was I?  Oh yeah, the young Huntsman.  Okay, so it isn’t long before he grows up into the hulking man mountain of machismo we know and love (Chris Hemsworth), and we soon learn that he is enamored with a fellow Huntswoman named Sara (Jessica Chastain).  Taking into account where these two currently reside, you can imagine how that goes over with the boss-lady.  Yeah, not too well.  Anyways, things pretty much….

Sigh.

Folks, I have to stop there.  In all honesty, this story is pretty much a mess.  Remember how I said this is the prequel part of the movie?  It should be called the prologue, but it’s too long and different from what comes later for it to deserve that moniker.  In short, things happen and poop goes south.  In what has to be one of the worst story transitions I’ve seen in a film in quite a while, our hero finally gets his battered, unconscious self thrown into an icy river and so begins, as we are informed by the ever-present narrator (Liam Neeson), his wondrous adventure with Snow White.

Wait!  What?  His adventure with Snow White?  The near-dead poor bastard is lying at the bottom of a frozen river.  How the hell does he get out of that?  Don’t just fade away to the sequel part, while referencing a movie I’ve already seen, and leave the details of what just happened to our imaginations.  At the very least, show him dragging himself up from the depths.  Believe me, my jaw dropped when this happened, especially when just moments later we are treated to a title card stating “7 Years Later”, and there’s the Huntsman all smiles on a glorious sunny day in the kingdom he helped save in the first movie.  Pity the poor viewer who has not seen the first film, because there isn’t any wondrous adventure with Snow White in this one.

Before I go any further, let’s talk about Snow White a bit.  She is important to the story as she is the one who starts the Huntsman on his main adventure, to go on a vital mission involving the magic mirror.  She also gets referenced a lot, but do you know what?  She’s not in this movie.  She appears for a very brief moment, but is only shown back-on and doesn’t utter a word.  Calling it a cameo appearance would be a gross over-exaggeration.   Now, if you happened to be a reader or surfer of the tabloids back when the first movie was released, you’ll know there’s a reason why Kristen Stewart (Snow White in the original) probably isn’t back for this go-around.  If you’re interested, Google it, as I won’t be going into the details here.  Whatever the reasons, her exclusion from this film – the character, that is – is handled in such a clumsy fashion, I actually felt embarrassed.  And I had nothing to do with the making of this film.

Do you know what they did?  They actually brought back Prince William (Sam Claflin) for a whole two minutes just to tell Huntsman, “Hey Brighton, Huntsman, Chris, whatever the hell your name is, Snow White wants you to do this thing for her.  You cool with that?  Right on.  See you later”.  Okay, okay, he doesn’t use those exact words, but that was the gist of it.  And then he’s gone.  No more Prince William in this story.  Thanks for dropping by Sam.  That sequel clause in your contract is fulfilled.  Good luck on your next project.  If the box-office on this is good, you might get a call down the road if we need someone to explain to Huntsman that Snow White is not around again because she’s at a spa retreat in Neverland.

Sigh.

Anyways, the sequel part of our story now gets underway.  Long story short, Huntsman heads off to find the magic mirror, hooks up with a couple of dwarves, gets into a few scraps, meets a couple of more dwarves, has a few more scraps, meets someone who should be dead, scraps, ends up in Elsa’s – sorry, I mean Freya’s – ice kingdom, meets someone I wish was dead, scraps, and lives happily ever after.  The end.  Well, at least until he gets his butt thown into another icy river before his next wondrous adventure.

I hate being snarky, but this movie almost begs for it.  It’s all over the place.  I really did enjoy the first one, and was really looking forward to this.  “Snow White and the Huntsman” was engrossing, full of life and wonder.  “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” is empty and flat, a movie that just wanders around trying to find itself.  Spoiler alert:  It doesn’t.

A lot is being made of the casting in this movie.  We have not one, not two, but three of arguably the best actresses working in Hollywood on screen together here.  What a shame they are given so little to work with.  Jessica Chastain is the only one who really gets to cut loose a little and have some fun.  She does get to flex her action heroine muscles quite a bit, but her character really gets annoying at times, especially when interacting with Huntsman.  I really wanted to just shake her a couple of times and tell her to snap out of whatever delusions she was having.  Charlize Theron shows up at the beginning and end, but is basically absent for most of the story.  She looks great and frowns a lot, and that’s about it.  How she gets herself into the sequel half is laughable, and actually does damage to the previous film.  I really hate it when prequels/sequels do that.  Emily Blunt started off so well at the beginning of this, but once she dons the mantle of Ice Queen, she’s pretty much relegated to lounging about her ice castle, casting icy stares and the odd icicle spell, and playing peek-a-boo with Bobo the mechanical owl from the original “Clash of the Titans”.

At this point, I should just let it go (pun fully intended), but I won’t.  The director and writers take shortcuts with the story that just don’t make sense at times.  How Huntsman manages to escape from a group of goblins is a headscratcher.  You’ll know it when you see it.  The action scenes are serviceable, but lack any real imagination.  The aforementioned goblin encounter was a highlight, but soon devolved into a scene reminiscent of the swinging monkeys in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.  And again, the escape.  They could have done better.  Strike that.  They should have done better.  Rushed is the best word I can ultimately come up with for many of the action set-pieces in this.  They start off promising, but then it’s like the filmmakers couldn’t figure out a cool way to end them properly and just said “the hell with it!” and took the lazy way out.  A scene involving our heroes scaling an ice wall is another good example of this.  It starts off great, but then crashes.  Literally.

And there is one wonky element of this story that cannot go ignored.  If you saw the first movie, you’ll remember that Queen Raveena had a brother named Finn.  He was the really creepy guy with the white hair lusting after Snow White.  Just as there was no mention of Raveena having a sister in the first movie, there is no mention in this one of Finn having ever existed.  And they were supposed to be inseparable.  Raveena and Finn were shown as children together in a flashback in the first movie just like the girls are shown together as children in this one.  Did the filmmakers forget about him, or did they hope that we had?  Just another headscratcher, I guess.

Okay, enough with the snark.  There is some good here.  If there was ever an actor to rise above the material he was given, it’s Chris Hemsworth.  For all the complaining I’ve done so far, I have nothing bad to say about him at all.  He is The Huntsman we came to love in the first film, just a lot happier.  He is fun to watch in this, and manages to hold his own even during the more ridiculous moments.  He does a great job.  I just wish the material had more to offer him.

Thank God for the dwarves.  There are only four of them this time out, and only Nion (Nick Frost) was actually in the first.  This time around, he shows up on the scene with his buddy Gryff (Rob Brydon), and later on they hook up with two lady dwarves who serve as both antagonists and potential love interests for our height-challenged heroes.  They brought some welcome moments of levity to the often dull proceedings and were definitely a highlight.

And….that’s about it.  I wish I had more good to say, but I don’t.  Ultimately, “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” is an unnecessary sequel which looks pretty at times, has a couple of not-too-bad action moments, and is good for a few laughs, but it fails to deliver on so many levels that I would urge you to re-watch the first one before laying down your hard earned cash to see this in the theaters.

Winter has come.  And it was brutal.

The Huntsman: Winters War opens in theaters nationwide April 22nd, 2016
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain, Charlize Theron
Written by Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin
Directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan