The Brothers Grimm: Critic Reviews

A pinata of visual effects that Gilliam keeps smashing, with diminishing returns.

Despite a few early sparks of promise, The Brothers Grimm sputters and coughs along like an unoiled machine, grinding gears and nerves in equal measure.

The best thing to be said about this expensive but drab wannabe mirthmaker is that it has some of its director's quirky touches.

Jammed with stuff and all but empty of drama.

Maybe not terrible so much as terminally silly.

An absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be.

If only summer movies were, as a matter of course, this inventive, this modest, this interested -- even derisively -- in cultural legacies, this faithful to concept and setting.

Sometimes delightful, sometimes tedious, always creative.

Those who adore Terry Gilliam for his taunting French soldiers in Monty Python and the Holy Grail or his weird subversiveness in Brazil may find The Brothers Grimm to be a fairy tale gone sour.

A messy fairy tale riff that overcompensates for a less-than-enchanting story with frenetic busyness.

It's worth watching even when it doesn't.

The Brothers Grimm is a work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot.

There is magic in The Brothers Grimm but it's hard to locate amid all the ... 'stuff,' I believe is the technical phrase.

If The Brothers Grimm flies apart like a badly designed airplane (and it does), it still has more going for it than most of the movie fare this summer.

Director Terry Gilliam's strong visual sense is ideally suited to this material, and he and his special-effects crew have cooked up some dandy images. Still, the moral of this story is that sometimes slick pictures alone aren't enough.

Terry Gilliam casts such a mad, magical spell over the proceedings that the film is endlessly energized and gleefully imaginative.

Fairy tales are all about feeding our imaginations, and Gilliam was only allowed to bring out the snack tray.

Mr. Gilliam has no clear idea what he's doing, so the movie is nothing more than noise, costumes and disjointed special effects that do not make an acceptable substitute for the sense of tempo the rest of the film sorely lacks.

Deeply lost in the woods.

This aimless epic about a pair of charlatan brothers sinks under the weight of a problematic script, questionable star casting, hamfisted editing -- and penny-pinching by Gilliam's latest patrons, the Brothers Weinstein.

Too violent for children and too inane for anybody else.

The result is something that might best be called Monty Python and the Holy Mess.

[Gilliam's] two great successes -- Time Bandits and especially Brazil -- were dazzling enough that he's been struggling ever since to prove that his best work isn't behind him. On the evidence here, the struggle continues.