Thursday, April 7, 2016

Film Review - The Huntsman Winters War (2016)

The Huntsman Winters War continues on from 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman and the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) must recover the Magic Mirror from the evil Ice Queen Freya (Emily Blunt) before she can use it to conquer the world but a mysterious woman from his past (Jessica Chastain) may turn up to complicate the quest.

The Huntsman Winters War is not the worst blockbuster I've seen but when I think about it there are 3 key problems I have with the film:

- The first is the really really generic sword and sorcery storyline on display here, elements of Game of Thrones, Frozen and Lord of the Rings are thrown together in a very haphazard kind of way that you just sit there feeling bored by it all as it begins to hit every little beat that the genre can sometimes pull off and when that happens you feel like your 2 steps ahead of the plot and after GOT and LOTR it's much harder for a fantasy show to really do something new in the genre.

- The second is the near complete waste of a wonderful cast consisting not only of Hemsworth, Chastain and Blunt but also Nick Frost, Sam Claflin (Finnick) and Charlize Theron and all of them don't really register a great performance, Blunt acts like she's about to turn into a Super Saiyan in one scene and then mumbles the majority of her lines, Theron goes way too OTT and sadly shows that her work in Mad Max Fury Road which was so good might have been a bright spark in a bad run and Chastain does her lines in a really off-putting Scottish accent and has little to no chemistry with Hemsworth.

As for Frost and Claflin well Claflin only has one scene and then that's it and Frost does his usual comedy stuff and I thought it worked for the most part while Hemsworth was fine again channeling that Mel Gibson esque quality he has but again his Scottish accent really put me off.

- And lastly the absence of Snow White from this story really hurts it as the Huntsman was a fine supporting character in the last film, she's briefly shown in the opening of the film but then nothing after that and I feel strongly that given the female oriented storyline that there was a key role for her to play but alas Kristen Stewart's casting and the off screen drama that came with the release of the previous film has most likely seen this happen and Universal has no one to blame but themselves for this as I'm certain they cast her due to her popularity at the time and now it's come back to haunt them.

And so that was Huntsman Winters War, again it's not bad but not great either and certainly not worth $15 at the cinema, 2 out of 5.