Hansel & Gretel: witch hunters - 2012

Hansel & Gretel: Witch hunters - 2012
Well, IMDB says 2013 but the credits say 2012. It wasn’t bad, it was fun enough and almost never boring, it’s a pity that the characters were so stupid but the movie is enjoyable nonetheless. Definitely not perfect, but very enjoyable, with a good cast, good costumes, good makeup, good credits. 

The story is simple: Hansel and his sister Gretel were abandoned in the woods when they were children; they found a house made of candy but the witch living there trapped them with the intention of eating them, or at least him. We all know the fairytale right? She wanted to make him fat so to eat him but she used the girl as a servant. In this movie, the girl frees herself and stabs the witch repeatedly, then brother and sister threw her into the fire to kill her. The story of the two ‘orphans’  goes around via newspaper, and during the opening credits we see how they grow up, saving children kidnapped by witches and killing the witches. 
Now they are all grown-up and witch-hunters by profession. They are hired by the mayor of a city where eleven children have disappeared. They stop the sheriff from burning Mina, an innocent woman, and start investigating. There’s a very powerful witch who needs twelve children born in the twelve months of the year and also the heart of a powerful white witch, to make a spell/potion/something that will make them all invincible, or at least fireproof, not sure they could survive being beheaded. Anyway. There’s a lot of shooting and fighting and then they save the children and stop all the witches; at the end they go on with their hunting and won’t stop until they’ll have killed all the evil witches... with the fanboy guiding them :-/ and Edward helping them :-)
I felt so bad when Mina died saving Hansel, I liked her very much, it was clear from the first moment that she was a good witch, never had any doubt with that fabulous red hair, and I didn’t want her to die. I kept hoping that Gretel would show up in time to use her white magic and save her like Mina had used her own to save Hansel’s life, but no :-/ That was the only thing that left me unhappy with it,  it was such a bitter ending for a movie like this. At least she saved Edward.

I thought that the fanboy was extremely boring. I liked the face, but the character was so stereotyped and boring :-/ Mina’s naked scene was totally useless and therefore the usual annoying cheap trick. 
At first both brother and sister think that there are only bad witches and there’s no such thing as a good witch, but then: they are immune to witches’ magic; Edward the Troll saves Gretel’s life and tells her that he did it because ‘Trolls serve witches’; Hansel & Gretel find a lot of witches’ stuff in a house that they realize to be their old childhood house; Muriel tells them that their mother was a very powerful white witch that send them away to save them; Muriel also tells them that she needs the heart of a powerful white witch and wants Gretel’s; Mina saves Hansel’s life after Muriel stabbed him and he acts all hostile, how-did-you-do-it-are-you-a-witch kind of thing, as if he had never heard of white witches before - hadn’t he been listening?? And never they confront or acknowledge the fact that Gretel is a witch herself, never she tries to see if she can do something, it’s as if they hadn’t discovered anything of importance, up to the last scene they keep their usual routine of firearms and crossbows. They say in this movie that Muriel was a specially powerful witch, and we see that she has a coven of a lot of witches, and yet she didn’t attack Gretel’s mother because she was ‘too powerful’ for her... it doesn’t seem a little thing to me! 

The witches died in a splatter way, and I’ve read this movie is : dark horror fantasy action : the action is there indeed, the fantasy also since there is magic involved; horror simply because of the splatter, but not so much, I never felt any warning from my stomach or felt scared by it, it’s nothing more than a little splatter to spice up the action scenes.
When they battle the whole coven, before Mina uses a machine gun on them, Hansel tells her 'when you see my signal unleash hell', like a true gladiator :p

I liked the brother-and-sister duo, I would have liked them more together. 

Hansel-Jeremy Renner
Gretel-Gemma Arterton
Mina-Pihla Viitala
Muriel-Famke Janssen

Sheriff-Peter Stormare

ITA: Hansel & Gretel - cacciatori di streghe