The Huntsman: Winter's War [M]

Years ago Queen Freya lost her lover and her daughter. Consumed by sorrow and grief, she fled to the North and created her kingdom through her powers of snow and ice. Instead of love and family, she raised her kingdom’s children away from their parents as her own army of Huntsmen. One grows up and deserts and, now, he is the obstacle standing between Freya and her sister Ravenna’s magic mirror, which has been sent from Snow White’s kingdom to a sanctuary, but has been stolen on the way. 

It’s been a while since I saw Snow White and the Huntsman, but I remember really liking that film, finding it a fun and dark take on the fairytale. I went into the cinema hoping that this one would be similar, a cool take on the story of the Snow Queen. 

Unfortunately, this was not so. 

Visually, this movie is still quite breathtaking; the CGI wizards obviously had free reign to create these mesmerising magic and battle sequences, which made for an enjoyable spectacle and the achievements in makeup and costumes was nothing short of incredible, both Queens’ outfits are absolutely immaculate. 

But this is more or less where my appreciation and enjoyment of the film stops. 

The central score of disappointment that this film inflicts comes from its floundering narrative. We’re having a Grimm fairytale (or at least a few of the characters from it) being blended together with the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of the Snow Queen, which potentially could have worked but really, really didn’t. If you want to look at it in terms of Disney, it’s a bit of a dark twist on Frozen, except Elsa’s sister is actually the evil queen from Snow White. At the moment this doesn’t sound too bad, but wait there’s more. 

In order to tie the film with Snow White and the Huntsman, it uses the character of the Huntsman and makes the movie more or less about him and this I felt is where the weakness was. Essentially, half of this film is a Hunstman origin story with the other half being a redemption tale and I can’t help but think that the battle between the powerful sisters would have been a better story to focus on with the Huntsman as a supporting character. As it is, the film is equally trying to tell two narratives and it achieves little success as the Huntsman’s story is boring and predictable and the war story between the two queens isn’t developed nearly far enough; truthfully it has to be the shortest and most anticlimactic ‘war’ ever. Big, big disappointment. 

The performances are all fine I guess with Hemsworth being all roguey and charming, Nick Frost and Rob Brydon being quite funny as the dwarves, and Emily Blunt being all cold and extremely melancholy, but at the end of the day there is just so much wrong with the narrative and the character ‘arcs’ that the better aspects of the film fall far short of the mark to taking my mind away from the negatives. 

Starring Chris Hemsworth, Jessica Chastain, Emily Blunt, Sophie Cookson, Nick Frost, Alexandra Roach, Sam Claflin, Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith, and Charlize Theron, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a big disappointment when compared to the novelty and the fun of the first movie. Filled with action, magic, great CGI, drama, romance, and comedy, there are some good aspects of it, but it’s the elephantine flaws in the story and script that held my attention hostage and I could not come away from how much it let everything else down.