Title: Huntsman: Winter’s War
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Director: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Jessica Chastain, Charlize Theron
Runtime: 1 hr 54 mins
What It Is: Following the events of 2012’s “Snow White and the Huntsman” I…think? This film actually takes place before those events to start and sees how that film’s most interesting character, The Huntsman (Hemsworth), came to be. You see apparently the first movies villain Ravenna (Theron) has a sister in Freya (Blunt) who is a highly powerful Ice Queen. Freya plans to conquer the north with her army of Huntsman. Children taken from their parents and taught that love does not exist and how to swing an axe, or sword or bow. Now as the Huntsman tries to get away from his past it will slowly start to catch up with him.
What We Think: What exactly were the character motivations? They changed so damned flippantly I could not keep up. One thing I have to wonder is how do you waste such a talented cast. Chastain …wasted. Blunt, useless. Theron, overacting up a storm. Snow White appears in the movie but it isn’t Kristen Stewart. Why might that be? It’s because she was terrible in the first film.
Our Grade: D, Don’t see this damned movie. It is a waste of time. Not only is the plot superfluously hard to follow but it is just plain dumb. Not only is there just nothing to offer in the way of a plot, but most insultingly it doesn’t try to. This relies on a franchise that does not the drawing power to simply rely on its name. If it were an established set of films like say…Star Wars it could simply come out and people would watch it. We’ll see about that in December when Rogue One: A Star Wars Story comes out.