The Huntsman: Winter’s War doesn’t just mention combat in its title — it’s also symptomatic of an ongoing battle. The current cinema fascination with re-imagined fairy tales has seen classic stories pop up as faithful retellings, fun new interpretations and grim revisions, though the different approaches have rarely found common ground. Offering up a sequel and a prequel to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman all in one, the latest effort attempts to combine all three into one busy package.
Alas, nodding to the Brothers Grimm’s material while also bringing Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen into the mix, and adding elements of pantomime-esque silliness yet persevering with a pervading atmosphere of seriousness, proves as lumbering and ill-fitting as it sounds.
Where Snow White and the Huntsman focused on the titular raven-haired princess, her evil stepmother Ravenna (Charlize Theron, Mad Max: Fury Road) and the huntsman, Eric (Chris Hemsworth, In the Heart of the Sea), its successor leaves the fairest of them all behind. Before the trio’s altercation, Ravenna worked her wicked ways on her sister, Freya (Emily Blunt, Sicario), encouraging her transformation into the frosty Ice Queen of the northern lands. As a boy, Eric grew up as a child soldier in Freya’s army, learning to fight and to eschew love above all else. When he formed a bond with fellow warrior Sara (Jessica Chastain, Crimson Peak), he earned his ruler’s wrath and barely escaped with his life. Now, after assisting with vanquishing her sibling, their paths cross once more — this time with a certain magic mirror coming between them.
A quest-fuelled standoff between forces of good and evil — and of affection versus restraint, and differing interpretations of strong female roles too — may provide The Huntsman: Winter’s War with its basis as well as its moniker; however that central conflict swiftly becomes the movie’s least interesting aspect. Writers Evan Spiliotopoulos (Hercules) and Craig Mazin (The Hangover Part III) cobble together fantasy cliches with reckless abandon to furnish the main narrative, drawing from Frozen, Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings as well as its centuries-old sources of inspiration, but it is the clash of those elements, rather than in the story they create, that elicits the most interest.
Sometimes, the film’s duelling sisters are flinging their emotional heft at each other. Sometimes, its long-lost lovers are trading blows and banter. Both components have their moments, even if they rarely form a coherent package. Indeed, in splicing the two together, the feature often seems at war with itself. Adding a quartet of comically bickering dwarves (Unfinished Business‘ Nick Frost, Cinderella‘s Rob Brydon, Black Work‘s Sheridan Smith and Testament of Youth‘s Alexandra Roach) and an army of attacking goblins might break up the to-and-fro, but it rarely helps.
That struggle manifests in a mood that veers from camp to solemn, and in performances that do the same. While the movie’s Liam Neeson-voiced narration speaks of both darkness and happiness, it proves their most convincing combination. Similarly, helmer Cedric Nicolas-Troyan fuses the alternatingly bleak and shiny into the look of his first feature — after graduating from the roles of special effects supervisor and second unit director on the film’s predecessor — but fails to impart the same tone or wring the same unity from his cast. Decked in intricate costuming, Hemsworth is suitably heroic, Chastain feisty, and Theron and Blunt are deliciously steely and acerbic in turn; however, mirroring the part-romp, part-overblown drama they’re in, they never quite manage to reach even the sum of their parts.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
The Huntsman: Winter’s War
Director: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
USA, 2016, 114 mins
Release date: April 7
Distributor: Universal
Rated: MA
Actors:
Director:
Format:
Country:
Release:
