'The Huntsman: Winter's War' Will Have You Reaching For The Poisoned Apples

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most weirdly violent, bad-CGI-filled, zany-dwarf-laden, tonally odd, totally messy, genuinely perplexing fantasy-action-movie fairy-tale-reimagining of them all?”

Why, it’s The Huntsman: Winter’s War, of course. A because-the-first-one-made-money spin-off of 2012’s Snow White And The Huntsman, this latest cinematic exercise in reclaiming public-domain fairy-tales from the Disney IP treasure-chest doesn’t just cut Snow White out of the title, but out of the film; Kristen Stewart banished, for her sexual on-set transgressions, to a world of amazing Olivier Assays collaborations. Amusingly, there’s a single shot herein of Snow White, from behind; the stunt-double-in-a-wig not even getting billing in the credits.

Without a K-Stew in sight, Winter’s War (no, it’s not a discarded Captain America title) starts out deep in back-story, back when the slain villainess of the first film, Charlize Theron, is a nascent figure-of-tyrannical evil, just cutting her teeth at it, really. Sure, she coldly kills some dude she’s playing chess against in an opening sting, but then she sits down for some non-murderous chess with heretofore never-mentioned sister Emily Blunt, whom she loves so much she not only doesn’t kill her, but often lets her win at chess. Theron also loves her so much that she arranges to have Blunt’s outta-wedlock baby murdered and her sexy-prince boyf banished, so as to teach li'l sister that love should never be trusted. Behold, Blunt becomes the cold-hearted Queen Of Ice, an eerily-accurate vision of what Elsa would’ve turned out like had Anna murdered her infant baby;ruling over a frozen kingdom where there’s only one law: love is forbidden!

“Love is a lie,” she commands to her kidnapped troop of child soldiers, who she rears from Dickensian ragamuffins into —in one smash-cut— grown-ass Sope Dirisu, Jessica Chastain, and Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth —the titular hero before the colon— and Chastain are both speaking in full-blown och-aye-the-noo/that’s-not-how-you-make-porridge ‘Scots’ brogues. Bonny wee lad and lass that they are, they dinnae care about the law o’ the land, and duly fall for each other; secret lovers tending to outlawed passion in a heartless world (not unlike, but also totally unlike, K-Stew and Nicholas Hoult in Drake Doremus’s dystopian parable Equals, which I guess is never coming out in Australia?).

But when Hemz and Chas get covertly married —“Aye! Ah dooooo!” Hemsworth actually says— Blunt is watching on via a magical eye-glowing owl-spell/cod-mystical-CCTV-drone. And, Ice Queen that she is, Blunt drives our star-cross’d lovers apart, to teach them a lesson that “the heart is a treacherous thing, and love is nothing more than a fairy-tale.” If you think that fairy-tale evocation is on-the-nose, the narration by Liam Neeson —who will look for you, will find you, and will kill you— is liberally littered with such cutesy meta commentary, speaking aloud ‘once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’ type tropes just to let you know that this is a dark, self-aware spin on genre.

Once Hem-dogg and Chas-banger have been torn apart, we jump forward seven years, to after the events of Snow White And The Huntsman; the film going from prequel to sequel (making it, effectively, a side-quel? A straddle-quel?) in one edit-and-intertitle. After that, The Huntsman: Winter’s War becomes a weird hodge-podge of other fantasy tentpoles: the army-building and territory-seizing cribbed from an episode of Game Of Thrones; the comical sneaking-into-the-Witch’s-castle raid uncorking the old unconvincing-disguise trope of The Wizard Of Oz; the zany, foul-mouthed, horny dwarves feeling plenty Hobbity; the ‘mirror’ a source-of-evil, turns-men-against-each-other MacGuffin biting on The Lord Of The Rings’ ring; there even a sequence in which marauding, chimp-like CGI “goblins” seem to have swung in from that terrrriiible Planet Of The Apes.

Chastain comes back from the dead as ninja assassin, and screenwriters Craig Mazin (who wrote the Hangovers two and three) and Evan Spiliotopoulos (who has a long history penning Disney straight-to-video sequels) love the back-from-the-dead revelation so much, they do it again. As, eventually, Mirror Mirror On The Wall vomits out a CGI river of liquid gold that becomes Theron, who’s even-more-evil as a resurrected spectre of pure maleficence (so to speak). And, from there, we rush towards a big final showdown with CGI black-goo and CGI ice battling it out with celebrity actors talking in bad Scottish accents for the fate of the Kingdom of the unseen Snow White, or for the existence of love, or something. Winter’s War is, ultimately, in all its misjudged shifts in tone and cobbling together of second-hand ideas, inconsistent, poorly stirred, and lumpy; this not how you make meaningful cinema, nor, evidently, how you make porridge.