When I was about seven I was running through the kitchen and slipped on the linoleum, flying headfirst towards the stove. With the grace and speed of a ninja I threw out my hands, neatly catching myself directly on top of the red-hot stovetop burner from which my mother had just removed a pot of boiling water. My scream reverberated throughout the house like a 747 taking off, and a moment later, I felt some of the worst pain I have ever felt in my life, mixed with the unmistakable aroma of burnt human flesh.  To this day, I haven’t been able to enjoy the smell of burning human flesh, but on the plus side I’m really fucking careful around stoves.

The point of this little anecdote? I’d gladly hold my hand on a red-hot burner in exchange for never having to watch Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters again.

When I first saw the trailer in late 2012 I thought to myself “That looks remarkably like a crock of shit”. Reviews confirmed this, and so I gave it a pass. Flash forward nine months and I found myself on a plane returning from Kentucky, full of chicken, bourbon, and regret. The inflight movie options were all things I’d already seen or things I refused to see, but then I figured, hey, Hansel & Gretel, I’m drunk enough that this might actually be enjoyable. It’s not going to be a good film by any stretch of imagination, but maybe there will be some gratuitous violence or gratuitous nudity involving Jeremy Renner [yes on both accounts but not in a good way] and I might enjoy myself.

The only good thing I can say about the movie is that it’s mercifully short, checking in at about 85 minutes, mostly because they didn’t bother to put in anything like explanations, or character development, or anything that would actually make the movie worth watching.

So after a short intro which basically rehashes the Hansel & Gretel fairy-tale a bored Jeremy Renner reads a few lines about how he and Gretel grew up kicking ass and killing witches. We get an opening credits sequences which shaves another few minutes off the running time and they roll into a village which is about to burn a witch that is not a witch in a scene that appears to be poorly stolen from Monty Python. The village has been suffering from having witches steal their children and they’re not particularly happy that H&G are there, even including a throwaway line about how they “brought the plague with them” even though that would only make sense of H&G had been there beforehand or at the same time the attacks started which is explicitly refuted by the movie itself. You’d think these townspeople would be glad the world-famous witch hunters are here to retrieve their children, but that’s because you’re thinking logically, and the movie’s scriptwriter couldn’t think hard enough to give them actual challenges to face so he had to manufacture shitty ones.

They track down a witch and Gretel has her dead to sights in her crossbow but doesn’t shoot her because she’s stupid. This allows for a cartoonishly awful chase/fight sequence which establishes witches as being incredibly fast and incredibly strong and there’s really no reason why you would ever want to engage one in hand to hand combat which is why despite this being a pseudomedieval setting, H&G hail from the land of steampunk and have an assortment of crossbows, pistols, shotguns, and other powerful long-range weapons they will spend the rest of the movie not using so they can engage witches in hand to hand combat.

There’s a cute scene where Hansel injects himself with insulin. See, being forced to eat candy for 1 day as a child gave Hansel diabetes, which is how diabetes works, so now he has to inject himself with insulin, because these backwater peasants know about how insulin, discovered in the 1920s, works. It’s so utterly stupid that I cursed out loud and got a dirty look from a passing flight attendant. Then I realized it was only in the movie to give Hansel a Flaw that will probably reappear during a climactic moment later in the film to make a dangerous situation even worse but overall will have no effect whatsoever on the plot. Guess what happens!

Fight sequence, Gretel gets her ass handed to her AGAIN and is knocked out and then rescued by a plucky peasant hero wannabe, and then this happens.

Because when I think of kick-ass film heroines I think of ones who are repeatedly rescued by men and then there are hilarious scenes where she’s unconscious and the guy washes “dirt” off her breasts in a very rapey way.

Gretel sets out to find Hansel, who we last saw hanging from a witch’s broom as she flew away. He wakes up slightly bruised in a tree. Sure, you’d think since he’s one of the only two possible threats to the witch’s existence in the entire fucking world that maybe the witch would just, you know, kill him while he’s unconscious, wounded, and completely defenseless, but…anyway, Hansel hooks up with a hot peasant in a pool and Gretel is ambushed by some men and has the ever-living shit beaten out of her AGAIN before she is rescued AGAIN. This time by a troll. A male troll. Eventually, she and Hansel find each other again and promptly run into the Big Bad, who kicks both of their asses and…kidnaps Gretel. Ah, competitent movie heroines. The Big Bad also leaves Hansel for dead rather than just making sure with a few dozen more stab wounds. Aren’t movies fun where the daring heroes can only succeed due to the villains being less competent than an average kindergartener?

So, Hansel and his one night stand who happens to be a Good Witch and Rapey McDouchebag suit up to take on the bad witches. Hansel pulls out a cartload of steampunk assault rifles and steampunk Gatling guns and they douse everything in holy water which will make them extra lethal to witches but also is kind’ve a bad thing to do to guns. They head off to the Gathering of Witches and put Hansel’s daring plan into play: The Good Witch will stand in an elevated position and mow people down with the Gatling, while Hansel and Gretel engage the witches in hand to hand combat…in the path of the Gatling gun.

Naturally, this plan works like a charm.

They murder the fuck out of the witches and square off against the big bad in a poorly choreographed fight scene in which Gretel is knocked to the floor leaving Hansel to finally put the screws to the Big Bad…until his lack of insulin kicks in OH NO. But it’s okay, because Gretel heroically rolls across the floor, heroically pulls out a syringe, and heroically injects the insulin, which allows Hansel to get up and finish off the Big Bad.

And that’s that.

It’s shit.