Her sister (Charlize Theron) is the wicked queen of this film’s predecessor, 2012’s so-so “Snow White and the Huntsman”, and she’s around this time just long enough to outshine everyone else – literally, as she’s so swathed in gold that she looks like a malevolent Oscar statuette. Now we should worry that studios will use this movie’s probable failure to discourage future female-centric blockbusters. Charlize Theron disappoints after a wonderful “Mad Max: Fury Road” recognition and Emily Blunt is okay as Freya. And will the Ice Queen take her sister’s side again?
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If you harbor a mad desire to see the film, you may want to let it go. Stewart is not in this movie, and Snow White only serves a tangential role. Freya is more romantic, and finds herself pregnant. This prequel begins with her learning that her niece will grow up to be prettier than her!
She appears to possess the powers of Elsa (from “Frozen”) – but has much less regard when it comes to hurting people. She heads north to run her own kingdom and sets about conquering others. The Huntsman gets a name here – Eric – because it turns out there are lots of Huntsmen: they are Freya’s army, children stolen from the subjects in her far-northern realm and turned into warriors.
But evil queens aren’t rejected so easily and Freya cruelly splits the two up and banishes Eric from the kingdom.
Every scene is sort of connected to each other, but really, we lurch from one attempted emotional beat to another, with little to no gravitas in any of them.
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This is where the film fast-forwards seven years, past the events of “Snow White and the Huntsman”. The back-and-forth banter from these four is a highlight. The rest is nice-looking preparation. Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin were hired to thread all these elements together, a futile task they perform heroically. All in all, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a movie that you’ll sit back and enjoy regardless of how you felt about the first movie. As his dulcet tones close the movie with something to the effect of the story may be over “but fairy talks never end”, it doesn’t seem so much like an ending as it does a threat that they might make a sequel to this mess. “They have to be in some catsuit”, Chastain told the Radio Times. It’s not a bad spin on combining these stories in a slightly different way, but it’s just another in the recent trend of fairy tale – fantasy world popularity. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk. I didn’t feel anything for the whacko pairing of Hemsworth and Chastain, or for Rob Brydon and Nick Frost’s mugging as the dwarves, or Blunt’s icy depression, but found myself quite enamoured of miniature disappearing elves, sparkling columns of ice, the bear-tiger that Freya rides and the mirror taking a molten, familiar shape.
