It's not exactly the fairest of them all, but there's no doubt this is one gorgeous-looking (and - sounding!) Blu-ray edition....
Universal / 127 Minutes / 2012 / Rated PG-13 / Street Date: September 11, 2012
Snow White and the Huntsman looks expensive. Every element of this fantasy tale's art direction and production design teems with big-budget sheen and the thing also comes to the screen with the best CGI effects money can buy. Official estimates put the movie's budget at around $170 million, but it wouldn't surprise me one lick if Snow White cost twice that.
Unsurprisingly, though, underneath this superhuman veneer lies a stillborn epic, a movie a vacuous and unconvincing as it is a beauty to behold. Charlize Theron pouts and leers with scenery-chewing gusto, and the concept of Bob Haskins, Ray Winstone, and Ian McShane as dwarves is patently irresistible, yet Snow White and the Huntsman never graduates from being a filmmaking-by-committee multiplex paint-by-numbers affair.
It doesn't surprise me that director Rupert Sanders has a history in successful video games - even with its hulking, leaden dramatic heart, Hunstman moves along with a kinetic inertia that at the very least lends its new take on the Snow White fable a certain degree of rewarding pace: I suppose one of the bigger compliments one could bestow upon the picture is that we never stay in one place long enough to get exceptionally bored with anything. And you know the drill - there's an evil queen (Theron), the fairest one of all (Kristen Stewart), and the huntsman from the movie's title (Chris Hemsworth) who all get thrown into the mix and have it out with one another.
But gossip hounds know that nothing in this fantasy flick carries any weight like its behind-the-scenes tabloid fodder. In this final summer before the very last sparkly vampire film we're likely to get, Stewart had Snow White, R-Pat had Cronenberg's latest, but both of them seem to have exchanged broken hearts. In short, I wish there was more to write home about in terms of Snow White and the Huntsman's implicit worth, but there's a very real possibility that it will be remembered as the movie that broke up the Twilight lovers.
Somewhere, a young girl is looking at her black-light Team Edward poster and screaming, "WHY????"
