Into The Woods – Should be straight to DVD, or even not made at all…

This is the first movie we watched in cinema this year, and sadly it turned out so bad, that I myself, for the first time ever, had to check my watch to see whether it would end soon. I have not watched the musical before, but I really cannot take this movie at all. It’s a weird combination of the stories, and a total destruction of the evergreen fairy tales that I have known since my childhood years.

The movie intertwined together four Grimm fairy tales: Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood and Razpunzel, with the main story about a baker and his wife and their hopeless effort to remove the curse that had been placed upon themselves by an evil witch next door. In their quest, their path crossed with the paths of Jack, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood and Razpunzel, and the story was unveiled.

The story started out not too bad, with the introduction of Jack, Cinderella, the baker and the Red Riding Hood, all singing the song about their wish. The song was quite nice and the actors’ voices could be given a pass grade. However, everything just went downhill from there.

Firstly, the story about the Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf and the Grandma sounded ridiculous and foolish (Poor Johnny Depp, his recent movies seem all awkward and not good match for his character and personality at all). The beautiful original story was twisted to the point of being stupid and the girl looked and sounded so mean and ugly I could not like her at all.

The second story, Jack and the Beanstalk, was also given a new touch, so radical that you can hardly recognise the original story, if not for the appearance of the cow and the beans. It was changed to fit into the movie, but you can really feel the unnatural flow of events, and the forcefulness of the plot. The boy can really sing, but a pity he did not have much room to show his skills, and the songs were not good enough either. What a waste. He was much better in the movie Les Miserables some years ago.

Finally, let’s spare a few words for Cinderella. The all time favourite fairy tale more or less kept to its main plot, until the very end, when Cinderella turned out to be a confusing girl who did not really know what she wanted, and ended up messing everything up and turning the whole story upside down. Yes, this girl is more real, more relatable to the normal girl of her age, while the original Cinderella is just too perfect to be true, but sometimes we just yearn for some fairy tale goodness and perfection to brighten up the normal days that are already filled with normal things, imperfect things. Otherwise, we will go for a teen movie, not a fairy tale in the first place.

There is another sub story here, which is Razpunzel, but there is really nothing much there except for the fact that there is a girl with long hair held inside a high towel by the evil witch, and in the end she broke free to find her true love. That’s it, you get the full picture. There’s no comparison with the Razpunzel animated movie, created by Disney also. Any comparison will be an insult. (By the way, the girl is quite pretty, which is a small bonus point).

As in all fairy tales, there is a bad character, and without fail, there is one here, the evil witch. But wait, is it really the case? For she appears to me quite lame indeed, and I still have doubt how they got rid of her. She appeared quite scary and powerful in the beginning, but towards the end, she became more and more annoying and useless, and then disappeared so quickly I could not really get hold of what happened actually. And there is another villain, the vengeful giant. She also disappeared equally fast and equally accidentally that the real cause of death was also not yet known. So, that’s it. No more baddie, the good prevails, everyone is happy, and the story ends, and I wasted 2 hours without any satisfaction at all 😦

This movie is really a waste of star power. You can see so many stars of high calibre, but they really cannot shine, no matter how talented they are, given such a weak plot and awkward songs with weird melodies. There are only one or two songs that are more or less palatable, the rest should be replaced with normal dialogues or silence. I really don’t understand why the ratings in IMDB and Rotten tomatoes are still so high for this total failure.