By now everyone probably has the Snow White story pretty well memorized. It’s one of the most famous fairy tales of all time and, heck, Hollywood just gave us a big screen adaptation of the tale a few weeks ago with Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror. So what is it that sets Rupert Sanders’ new take on the material, Snow White and the Huntsman, apart? What does it have to offer that makes yet another retelling of the classic Snow White story necessary? Not much, really. It’s a little bit more gothic, aesthetically, it’s a little more horror inspired, tonally, and it replaces the charming Prince with a bad boy anti-hero. So, add that all up and I guess the thing that separates Snow White and the Huntsman from other versions of the Snow White story is the fact that it’s being sold to teenage girls rather than pre-teen girls. If you’re a teenage girl, especially one that saw yourself in Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of Bella in the Twilight films, or drooled over Chris Hemsworth’s pecs in Thor, then that’s got to be good news. For the rest of us, not so much. But, all things considered, this one could have turned out a lot worse.
Doing a rundown of the plot seems a bit ridiculous, so let’s jump right into talking about the lead performances. Charlize Theron does most of the heavy lifting with her portrayal of the evil Queen. How dedicated is Theron to bringing the appropriate amount of evil to this character? She’s eating F’n bird hearts in this movie. She throws herself into this role gleefully and committedly, tapping into all of the preening and posturing evil that she has inside of her. She goes big with her performance, shooting for showy, but most of what she does works because she’s never visibly having fun doing it. She never winks at you or plays her evilness for humor, and that saves her from the hamminess that Julia Roberts brought to the role in Mirror Mirror. As a matter of fact, Theron might have even been completely awesome in this movie if the dialogue she had to deliver wasn’t so wretched. Give her about 50% less lame speeches and 50% more creepy facial emoting and her depiction of Snow White’s evil Queen would have been one for the record books.
Kristen Stewart is less reliable as Snow White. Her version of the character is delicate and kind, sure, and she’s perfectly capable of playing all of the damsel in distress stuff that she has to do in the first half of the film, but in the later parts of the movie she’s asked to do some things that she’s just not capable of. I know that Stewart is an actress that gets a lot of hate on the Internet, and I don’t want to be just another negative voice jumping on the pile, but she’s really got to stop picking high profile roles that don’t play to her physical strengths. She’s got a unique look, it’s not unattractive or anything, but she’s got some dark circles under her eyes, and she looks rather sickly. Why she keeps getting cast in roles where the other characters go on and on about how she’s the most beautiful creature ever and the greatest woman in history is beyond me. Kristen Stewart is the stoner best friend. Cast her in something like that and nobody would have a problem with her. Cast her as Bella or as Snow White, try to sell us on the fact that she’s the fairest in the land, and you’re just opening the door for nasty criticisms. Cast her in a role where she’s asked to go into battle wearing a suit of armor and give a big rousing speech to a mass of troops, like she is in this film, and she’s just going to fall on her face. There were people audibly laughing during Snow’s big passionate Braveheart speech in my theater, and I wasn’t even one of them. That’s a sign of blatant miscasting if I’ve ever seen one.
You know who does have the gravitas to pull off a Braveheart speech though? Chris Hemsworth. He’s an actor that has that perfect mix of passion and charisma that Mel Gibson brings to the table, but with more muscles and hopefully less legit craziness. What’s he given to do in this movie? Nothing much more than play the archetypical hero. He’s haunted by his past, but he has a good heart. He’s handsome, and he’s physical, and he’s pretty much just playing Thor again. But, oh my goodness does he pull these sorts of parts off well. He’s believable with the physical stuff, he’s so charming that I want to renounce heterosexuality and date him, and he even sells the more emotional moments. He may be the best potential action hero that’s come along in a really long time. It’s ironic that it’s his brother who got a slot in the new action all-star Expendables 2 cast and not Chris.
Other than a couple of watchable performances from Theron and Hemsworth, what else does Snow White and the Huntsman have going for it? For one, it’s really pretty to look at. Not only did Sanders and his cinematographer Greg Fraser shoot the film beautifully, they also came up with some striking and unique visual images that will probably be the first things that pop into people’s heads when this movie gets brought up years from now. A lot of digital effects work gets shown off in the nature scenes, and it's all rather impressive. Not only do all of the critters they’ve created boast interesting design, they’re all capably animated as well. And their inclusion even benefits from the fact that the screenwriters found a way to incorporate the idea that Snow White can communicate with animals into this world in an organic way, as well as one that’s integral to the plot. Basically, anything in here that involved Snow White being out in the woods, I enjoyed quite a bit.
Unfortunately, the inclusion of the nature elements is about where the cleverness of the screenwriting stops. Snow White and the Huntsman is the sort of movie that inspires moviegoers to turn to their theater dates and ask questions that begin like, “Why didn’t she just...” There are plot holes big enough that they couldn’t be plugged with all of the poison apples in the world. The most glaring of which is the fact that the Queen keeps Snow White locked up in the dungeon her entire childhood instead of just immediately stealing her youth and killing her outright. She has a pretty set in stone modus operandi, if somebody crosses her she magically steals their youth and then she instantly kills them. Nobody else gets locked up and forgotten like Snow White does, and the film doesn’t even bother to give us a stupid excuse as to why she’s kept alive. It just kind of hopes that nobody will notice that it doesn’t make any sense. In a movie that was more fun, or in a movie that only made one misstep, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. But this script forcefully pushes its characters around to the places that the classic fairy tale’s structure needs them to be with no concern for logic or staying true to their motivations, and it grows tiresome.
There are some pretty big missed opportunities here as well. Early on the notion that a woman’s beauty equals power gets introduced, and it seems like it’s for good reason. In this movie, thanks to a magic spell, beauty very literally does equal power, both for Snow White and for the Queen. A character like the Huntsman, conversely, is only powerful because he has big muscles and can fight well. It seemed like some interesting exploration was going to be done regarding gender issues and how men and women exploit their various attributes, but, alas, there wasn’t.
Similarly, the Huntsman character seems far more interesting than he eventually proves to be when he first gets introduced. He’s a rebellious sort, not likely to go off on an errand for the Queen; but she knows his weakness. He’s haunted by the death of his wife and the Queen knows that a promise that she’ll be resurrected is the only thing that could get the Huntsman to agree to travel into the dark forest and find Snow White. The stakes here are huge. If he does what the Queen asks, the drunken Huntsman can relieve himself of all his pain and get his life back on track. But the dark forest is pretty much the most dangerous thing ever, so he’ll have to risk everything. Unfortunately, the followthrough craps all over the setup. The idea that the Queen can actually resurrect anyone gets dismissed pretty early on, and the idea that entering into the forest equals certain death appears to be a bait and switch when the Huntsman is revealed to be actually quite capable of traversing its disappointing dangers. Snow White and the Huntsman always teases that it could be a better movie, but it never delivers.
Still, shouldn’t the fact that it has some great visuals, fun performances, and a decent amount of action make this movie an easy recommendation? Not quite, it also has pacing problems. We’re told over and over again that Snow White is the only person who can defeat the Queen, but we’re never given any indication of how she can defeat her, or even what that fight would look like—so the movie lacks urgency. And somewhere around two-thirds of the way through, it starts to feel pretty long. Even with a run time of over two hours this movie just tries to pack too many characters (I haven’t even mentioned the awesome actors who play the Seven Dwarves), too many set-pieces, and too many plot points into one sitting. You’re left with the feeling that if everything had just gotten a better chance to breath, if this was made as a mini-series rather than as a stand-alone feature, everything would have played a lot better. There are worse things that you could see in the theater—and if you happened to see Mirror Mirror you already saw one of them—but there are still too many problems here to make Snow White and the Huntsman a recommendation. Maybe catch it on cable.
