If this is progress, count me out. While Snow White reigns in her respective kingdom, over in the north, Freya is raising an army of soldiers in lieu of children.
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Stewart played the role of Snow White in director Rupert Sanders’ Snow White and The Huntsman. The next, it’s a deathly serious fantasy epic.
One of the challenges Nicolas-Troyan faced while making the film was how to distinguish Blunt’s ice queen Freya from Charlize Theron’s Ravenna. Ravenna’s powers are whatever she needs, from shooting out tar tentacles to instant home pregnancy test. The latter gift shows her sister Freya (Emily Blunt) to be expecting. Eric is one such Huntsman, and grows close to another, Sara (Jessica Chastain). That being said though, the love story angle that forms the other main aspect of this movie, is decidedly more interesting to watch, thanks to Hemsworth and Chastain’s fairly decent chemistry. He can do the high-wattage smile and the goofy aside just fine. Not in his arsenal.
In the sequel part, heralded by a “7 years later” title, Eric and Sara have been driven apart, Ravenna’s been dispatched, and Freya is on a kingdom-conquering, kid-snatching roll. Freya split them up, but they’re reunited years later when they go on a hunt for Snow White’s mirror, which was apparently stolen and now also apparently has similar powers as the ring from “The Lord of the Rings“.
It’s really hard to buy Blunt in bad-girl mode, and Chastain is mostly one-dimensionally stoic as the only woman who has found tight black leather trousers in this magical landscape. Speaking in a odd accent that sounds like it’s from Scotland via Cornwall, Hemsworth is a tremendously charismatic performer who saves the movie by taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to his part, and he is well supported in levity by the dwarfs Nion and Gryff (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon).
Costume Designer Colleen Atwood is worthy of a shout-out simply for creating enough dazzling dresses and gowns for the actors to wear to at least blind the viewer with beauty while their ears are lambasted by lame dialogue. “Huntsman 2” might have worked a bit better without the shackles of a franchise or the pomp or the name stars or even the budget.
The film adopts its predecessor’s rather dark tone at points, peppered with scenes of stunningly visual epic melodrama featuring some eye-popping visual effects, some cute forest creatures or truly scary monsters, yet often these fizzle out into tepid scenes of non-action, while its attempts at humour don’t hit the mark as often as they should.
However, at the end of it all, we are left with a pretty disappointing mish-mash of filmmaking that makes it clear this was a movie made by committee – and clearly that committee was composed of folks who were not all on the same page when it came to spinning what could have been a much more engaging piece of fantasy storytelling.
There is a decent movie buried in here somewhere, but with such powerhouse actresses it’s dismaying that it feels so regressive from the first.
We’re also introduced to The Huntsman’s wife, Sara (Jessica Chastain), who, at least according to “Snow White and the Huntsman”, was dead by the time that film took place. Here the ladies are props and stereotypes and always one heartbreak away from madness.
The jump in time is implausible, and none of the characters this time around is all that compelling – including Hemsworth, the sole male lead.
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On the other hand, “The Huntsman: Winter’s War”, like the first one, is magnificently gorgeous to look at, which begs the question of why Universal has declined for a second time to release the film in either 3D or IMAX (the film is released in 3D overseas, but not in the U.S.).
