Okay, so it’s not Friday, but it’s close enough. It’s a long rant so I don’t expect you to finish it. In short it’s a really bad movie, you shouldn’t watch it. There, I just saved you half an hour of reading.
It’s been a while since I saw something so bad. What is it with kid’s movies butchering snow white? I’m sorry; I shouldn’t say kid’s movies. This was not an appropriate movie for children. Or anyone for that matter. I am very glad that I only paid two dollars to see this.
So here’s the story: Snow White’s mother died giving birth to her. Her father raised her to rule in his place someday, everyone was happy and danced and sang and stuff. Then he decides that she needs a mother so he takes a new queen who narrates the first half of the story. When he disappears in the dark wood, supposedly eaten by some dark beast, she takes over, squandering the wealth of the kingdom on parties and keeping herself beautiful. She keeps Snow White hidden away in a tower so that she won’t be a threat because she’s the rightful ruler and whatnot. Not to mention she’s supposed to be prettier. Snow turns 18 and wanders out and finds out that the kingdom is in terrible condition and apparently only consists of one village. Go figure.
Enter dopy prince and the seven dwarves. The dwarves were, for the most part, the best part of the whole movie. The only almost good part. They’ve invented stilts in order to rob people. Who better to rob than a prince who apparently has nothing better to do than to seek adventures and his traveling companion who disappears and has no bearing on the plot whatsoever? The prince is a prick, and a dimwit. He mocks the dwarves after they kick his ass, which results in him being hung upside down along with his sidekick in nothing but his underwear. Snow helps him and being a very sheltered child falls in love with him despite him being a prick and utterly ridiculous.
Guess where he’s going? To the palace where there’s almost a plot point of the sidekick going to get soldiers and gold and clothes, but nothing ever comes of it. The queen wants to marry the prince because he’s super rich and supposedly good looking. Yeah, I don’t see it. Naturally he falls in love with Snow White at the ball before she’s banished for challenging the queen. The servant who takes her out sets her free where the dwarves find her and decide to keep her while they thieve. She gives the money they steal back to the people making them heroes in the village which comes to nothing as well. They decide to turn her into a thief in order to get back at the queen. Short montage later and the prince comes looking for the bandits that have been plaguing the kingdom, seeing nothing wrong with the creepy queen. They fight, Snow sucks, the prince makes you want to choke him and she uses dirty fighting to finally beat him, sending them back again without their clothes.
Magic time! Queen puts a spell on the prince, turning him into a puppy so that he’ll marry her, because she’s his master and he loves her. Puppy love indeed. She uses the mirror, the only actually cool part of the movie, to send puppets after Snow White and turns her servant into a cockroach for a time so he can be violated by a grasshopper, apparently. Yeah, for kids. Snow and the dwarves go after the wedding and kidnap the prince who is sobbing pathetically because he’s not with the queen and they try to break the curse in various ways before realizing they need true loves kiss. When that works the queen comes after them with the dark beast that has been used to threaten people into paying taxes for the entire movie. Guess who the beast is? The king! Who’d have guessed? I would, but I watched the movie and it was rather painfully obvious. I’ve spoiled it for you now and saved you the pain of watching the movie for that twist.
So they break the curse on the king, save the kingdom, the queen learns the price of using magic and tries to kill Snow one last time with the classic apple and fails making it utterly pointless. Happy ever after, the end, roll stupid music video and YOU’RE FREE!
God, this movie was painful. It started out not so bad, there were a few good jokes, the prince didn’t seem so bad at the ball when he was flirting with Snow, but it’s all downhill from there. Half of the plot points you think might be important disappear, never to be seen again. There’s a thing about saying please established when they first meet that comes back at the end, but it doesn’t make any sense. The prince is just pathetic, in every form. Over all there’s just very little consistency.
Snow White was supposed to be a strong female lead but they didn’t pull it off at all. She starts out naïve and is supposed to discover the world and do something to change it. Learning to be a thief comes to nothing, she never does anything more to help the people than give back their gold that one time, she’s not a good fighter even after all the ‘training’ they did, she gets swatted around by the prince, she thinks more of herself than she should and somehow gets praised for it. Near the end she pulls some crap about reading a lot when she was being kept in the palace but we never saw any evidence of it and locking her friends in their house is a really stupid move and a great way to get yourself eaten by whatever monster is hanging around. She was so annoying and her eyebrows were huge. I know, I shouldn’t judge, but they could give UK’s a run for their money and for the ‘fairest of them all’ you’d think she’d have some more shapely eyebrows.
The prince was a prick. Have I said that enough yet? Because he was a complete douche. Seriously, he’s looking for adventure when he’s probably got a kingdom to run, he’s stupid as all hell, getting his ass handed to him by a group of dwarves on stilts then refusing to fight them when he discovers that they are dwarves because they’re “children.” He tries to save face by lying about who had ambushed him but that fails miserably. He believes the queen over Snow White when he should be more inclined to believe the one who A) hasn’t lied to him yet, and B) he’s supposedly in love with. His own side kick tells him the queen is crazy, with maybe the last good line in the movie, and he completely ignores him (side note: Sidekick was pretty cool, why couldn’t they keep him around?). He’s whiney and pathetic even before the puppy love potion which really just amplifies his true colors. After they free him from the spell he makes a comment that he hates the queen, but again, there is no evidence of him being anything more than a little creeped out by her forward advances.
That brings us to the queen, I guess. She was a creep. She wasn’t intimidating, she wasn’t frightening; she was whiney and creepy and really annoying. Her whole thing was staying young and beautiful, which she poured a lot of money into which bankrupted the kingdom which meant she had to find a rich husband which I guess she did a lot. When things don’t go her way she runs off to talk to her reflection which is… the part of her that can use magic? Her better, more logical self? A thing that looks like her that she trapped in a wooden hut somewhere? Yeah, we never find out why she’s in that hut in the middle of some body of water, or why there’s another wooden building behind it, or anything about it for that matter other than her reflection is way cooler than she is. The reflection is wise and calm and actually really well done. However, the queen never listens to her warnings against using magic and the price she will have to pay and just demands that she “punish this person” and “make this person fall in love with me” and “get rid of that person” and on and on and on. They go through this whole big ‘treatment’ scene, obviously making fun of the things people go through to stay young. They put bird poop on her face, run snakes over her, jab her lips with bees, put insects in her ears and stuff like that. It’s a gross and rather pointless scene thrown in there for kicks and giggles. Only no one was laughing.
Let’s talk about the dwarves, shall we? Instead of giving them the generic “Happy” “Sleep” “Grumpy” names they gave them names like “Grub” and Butcher” and “Chuck.” I will give them that, it was a nice touch. The dwarves had personalities of their own, some stereotypical, some original. They were the only good actors out of the whole cast. Or at least the only ones how acted well. I’m trying not to blame the actors too much because the writing was so bad it’s impossible to tell if the actors themselves are bad or if they were just written that way. There’s really only so much you can do with a bad script. Anyway, the dwarves each have their own fighting style from knives, to wrestling. They each also have their own quirk, which is to be expected of a Snow White movie. One of the things the movie was going for was a sense of realism and the only ones who pulled it off well were the seven dwarves. Their dialogue was natural and their actions and reactions were believable. Unfortunately they were saddled with Snow White who acts like a cardboard cutout of a princess.
This movie couldn’t decide if it was a kid’s movie or an adult film so it was neither. A lot of the humor in it was stuff that a little kid might laugh at and the characters and plot were so dumbed down it couldn’t possibly be intended for adults. However there were a lot of inappropriate bits in there that I would not want my kid to hear. Comments about a grasshopper taking advantage of a guy while he was a cockroach and the prince spanking Snow White through their entire fight scene are not things I want a child exposed to, even if they can’t understand it. If a kid’s not going to get it why put it in a kid’s movie? The running gag about the queen being distracted by the prince’s shirtless state is going to go right over most kids’ heads so why is it there? It’s just going to confuse them and the parents aren’t laughing so there is no point to it.
I will give the movie one thing, the effects were pretty good. The mirror was cool, the giant puppets looked neat until they put stupid faces on the one and the dragon at the end was actually pretty badass. It was more of an eastern style dragon which isn’t what you would expect, but it looked cool at least. However the effects couldn’t save the movie from the leads being unlikable twats, the bad writing, the plot switches and the overall poor quality of the production. I get the feeling at least half the actors in this film are very sorry that they were. My advice? Don’t waste your money, don’t waste your time, and don’t waste your brain cells trying to watch this movie. If you must, wait until it comes out on Netflix, get a bunch of friends together and heckle the crap out of it. I’m sure it’ll be a lot more fun that way.
Down The Rabbit Hole 