Watch of Shame: The Brothers Grimm
And now it’s time for one of my favorite things: discussing a truly terrible movie!
This month, I decided to see if any of the movies in the ‘leaving soon’ category on HBO Max (a section of the streaming service I often frequent to pick what to watch) had the so-bad-it’s-good reputation and some horrible Rotten Tomatoes ratings in order to get my next watch of shame pick. It didn’t disappoint. So, I give to you, The Brothers Grimm, a movie with a solid cast (Heath Ledger, Matt Damon, Lena Headey, etc.) and both an audience score and critic score in the 30s on RT. It was perfect. And it was absolutely a baffling film.
The way I know this movie was the perfect pick was looking back through the messages I sent a friend of mine while watching it. A few of my favorite snippets include:
A horse just cocooned a child in spider webs and ate it?
Also a tree just ate a man.
Um, I think a child just got possessed by mud and then jumped in a well and drowned herself? (My friend’s response of, “Well that’s bound to happen eventually,” also needs to be appreciated.)
A wolf just turned into a man in a lot of clothes
They just put glass slippers on a girl AND pricked her finger with a spindle. It’s like mixing metaphors.
The French are the bad guys and the Germans are good so that’s an interesting twist.
Someone’s dying words were, “A slice of quiche would have been nice,” in this thing.
Hold up, this movie was directed by a member of Monty Python.
Normally, I would have tried to format that into a coherent paragraph, but these really sum up my experience watching this film. And unfortunately, none of those are hyperbolic or misrepresented. All of those lines are related to things that happened in this absolute mess of a movie.
Despite being about stories we’ve known for many, many years as a culture, The Brothers Grimm managed to combine almost all of those fairy tales into a jumble that was extremely difficult to make sense of. There’s an ancient queen in a tower who had Rapunzel-like hair who was determined to once again be the fairest of them all like the Snow White antagonist. A girl is kidnapped, put into a trance-like sleep a la Sleeping Beauty, put in a tomb like Snow White, had her finger pricked with Sleeping Beauty’s spindle and somehow had glass slippers that appeared out of nowhere jammed onto her feet. And that isn’t even the main plot that circles around the titular brothers.
Heath Ledger and Matt Damon play brothers who have created a name for themselves as witch/evil hunters, but are actually little more than hustlers and magicians. They rig up fake magical threats and then come in, saving the day and getting thanks - and quite a chunk of change - from the grateful village they “saved.” Then, a French military/ruler guy (it isn’t fully clear) finds out about them and “arrests” them, but then reveals he has heard of another set of snake-oil salesman type guys who are pulling the same tricks elsewhere - and all when the brothers were confirmed to be in another location. Their mission? Put a stop to it and minimize the unrest in the French’s new territory.
That’s where all the crazy fairy tale snippets come in. Turns out, it isn’t a fake. There’s something rotten in Denmark. Or, rather, wherever this village is supposed to be. And I’d go into more details about what they find and how it plays out, but I think my list above does it well enough. I’m not sure I can recommend this movie to people, but maybe if you play a drinking game where you take a sip whenever you’re confused, you won’t care how bad it is by the end.