I place the many failures of The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016), at the feet of Universal Pictures. Sometimes an effects-laden film derails because the director can’t reconcile the live action with the future post-production work. The technology overwhelms the story, much as it did in Peter’s Jackson’s King Kong (2005), or his Hobbit (2012-2014) series. While those films had other faults, the FX heavy scenes threaten to unhinge the movies from the simple stories they are trying to tell.
The Huntsman, while it suffers from the malady of visual excess at the sacrifice of story, could easily have been saved from itself if anyone who read the script rejected it as a disjointed, unimaginative, overly stoic, ham-fisted attempt at a fairy tale mashup. It seems that someone knew about the poorly crafted narrative because the first character we meet is the narrator (an uncredited Liam Neeson), and even his dulcet-voiced exposition often fails to offer clarity. If not for the nearly ever-present voice, the production might fear that the loosely woven narrative threads would unravel, transform into a flock of birds and descend into heaven, each in their own direction.
The first scene, where Ravenna (Charlize Theron) plays footsies with her husband, the King, moments before she transforms a game of chess into magic checkmate that ends his life, broadcasts that this is not a children’s movie. Disney’s Snow White (1937) certainly had its dark side, but it’s packaged with quick redemption, genuine comic relief from the dwarves, and authentic innocence radiating from Snow White.
Writer’s Craig Mazin and Evan Spiliotopoulous write only a couple of jokes that land, and there is but a brief flash of innocence from Emily Blunt’s Freya before the murder of her child. From then on we are led into a meandering, disjointed and depressing world. The stage is set with the Snow White cliché as evil Queen Ravenna finds herself threatened by the future beauty of a child. But that trope has been done, say the writers, so “let’s embellish”.
Not only did they have the Queen enchant the lover to kill the child (a spoiler for those of you who didn’t make it to the flashback explanation at the end of the film), but they wrote Freya as a witch who had not yet come into her powers. As Ravenna hopes, the death of the child quickens the magical and despondent heart of her grief-stricken sister and transforms her into … Killer Frost, no, the Snow Queen of Arendelle, no, actually, well eventually, the Ice Queen, after she casts out love and conquers all the kingdoms of some north.
As Ice Queen, Freya banishes love from her kingdom. She gathers up children; recruits she claims to be saving from love by turning them into heartless killers. A child training montage ensues and morphs into an adult training montage. Two of the adults are Jessica Chastain’s Sara, and Chris Hemsworth’s Eric, neither of whom drank from the Queen’s icy Kool-Aid font. Also, these two fancy each other.
The Queen discovers the forbidden love using her voyeuristic, virtual reality owl, that spies the couple as they illegally marry in a hot spring. The couple immediately decides to run off together. Ice Queen Freya confronts them at their rendezvous point. She will set them free if they can fight their way through their fellow Huntsmen, which they do. She then throws up a wall of ice that tricks the audience and the characters into thinking Sara is dead, and as we discover later, also suggesting to Sara that her Huntsman ran away. The ice wall deception offers the movie’s only working plot twist.
This all takes place before Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), a prequel which turns into a sequel after there is a journey narrative shoved into the middle of Winter’s War in which at the behest of Snow White’s King, two dwarves and Eric go off in search of the magic mirror, lest it gets into the hands of the Ice Queen. This entire section of the story feels like a different movie. The narrator departs; the two queens are mentioned but not seen. The audience meets four dwarves: two from Snow White’s team, and two women. If the female dwarves were real, they would be protesting this movie over their unfair portrayal by the male dwarves.
We also meet fairies and goblins. Chastain and Hemsworth are proffered the opportunity for charming banter as the films focuses on them, but it all falls like damp moss on the forest floor. They do get to kick a bit of goblin ass, but the jeopardy never feels suspenseful because the outcome, the recovery of the mirror, is so inevitable.
The one place the writers had a chance for real uncertainty was in the mirror’s power to turn groups of compatriots and clans against each other, as is seen in the “dead team” moving the mirror for safe keeping, and the goblins who wrestle it from them. When the winds blow a protective blanket from the mirror, Eric, for a moment, feels its hatred well up inside of him. He reaches for his knife, but his anger is blunted by Sara, and no one else in the party seem affected. Then the Ice Queen comes in, reclaims the mirror, and packs the intrepid party off to the finale in which love conquers all — obviously, after a bit of senseless fighting between Freya and a resurrected Ravenna, who has been brought back from inside the mirror by her sister’s evocation of the “Mirror mirror” incantation.
The Huntsman just isn’t a very good movie, but it’s not without its merits. It could be thought of as a set of nested eggs. On the outer layer we find enticingly elegant and camera-worthy costumes. Jewel encrusted and captivating these costumes will outlive the film as objects in a film museum exhibit to be “oohed” and “aahed” over for decades. In many scenes, costumes offer the only life for the lens.
Next layer down, the makeup is detailed and consistent: believable if not beguiling, with subtle tattoos and scars, Emily Blunt’s pale blue skin, and Theron’s dripping black bile all executed with prowess.
Then we find the exquisite beauty of Theron, Blunt, Hemsworth and Chastain, all of whom would be more appealing if they were Madame Tussauds likenesses that we could nuzzle up to, close and intimate, and more real is some ways than the winsome cast set adrift in this rudderless film.
Further down is the music, which pours decisively through the film: well-wrought and occasionally enchanting.
Then a layer of special effects that aren’t always effective. The wall of ice that separates the two young lovers sprawls forth against the edge of the screen like it has emanated from a video game. Ravenna’s overused pointed black prongs poke, stab, and fire too often. The fantasy dwarves, played by digital faces seemingly stitched to the bodies of real dwarves, just make Nick Frost’s Nion and Rob Dryndon’s Gryff sad counterpunches to the full-sized cast. Their size is diminished even more by the comic sidekick enthusiasm they never muster.
At the core we find a withered, disfigured lump of a fairytale with the wrong edges. Darkness and despair are sharpened, and the important ones, like cohesive story and believable love and redemption, are stubby and dull. This is a fairytale that has been broken and glued together poorly with some pieces still too loosely attached to be considered a part of the whole.
Having sat through and un-nested this film, after so much promise in the packaging, I found myself highly disappointed by the lack of treasure at its center.