YMMV / Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

• Cliché Storm: The movie plays like your typical horror-themed arcade game. Two players with loads of guns and ammo, blasting monsters (witches) into ludicrous gibs, saving the hostage villagers (children), along with a Big Bad final boss. And the Adventure Continues. It also helps that the heroes struggle against powerful witches, much like how a stage boss takes a lot of punishment before getting destroyed.
• Complete Monster: Muriel the Grand Black Witch is the leader of the Black Witches and the vilest one in existence. She orchestrated the deaths of Hansel and Gretel's parents as part of a plot to use Gretel in a Human Sacrifice to make witches impervious to fire. Years later she and her lieutenants kidnap twelve children to use in the sacrifice, after already boiling one down for a magic brew. Muriel kills anyone who attempts to rescue the children, putting a curse on one tracker that forces him to eat maggots before exploding upon returning to Augsburg. When one witch is captured, Muriel sets part of the town on fire as a distraction, and forces a guard to shoot himself with his own gun. She later kidnaps Gretel to cut out her heart as part of the new sacrifice. When this fails, she takes Hansel and Gretel back to the Gingerbread House where they killed their first witch, before she murders the good witch Mina, whom Hansel fell in love with.
• Critic-Proof: The film received harsh reviews from critics, but proved to be a success at the box office, grossing $226 million worldwide, against a $50 million budget.
• Draco in Leather Pants: The witches, particularly Muriel and her two crones (Horned Witch and Red-Haired Witch).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Edward has minimal screen time, not appearing until halfway through the film, but is quite well-liked for being a benevolent troll who sides with Hansel and Gretel to join them by the end.
  • The two main witches who serve as Muriel's crones - the spiky-haired witch and the red-haired witch - are quite popular for how evil they are.
• Genius Bonus: Mina is a redhead and assumed to be a witch even without the obvious markers of being one in this story. Middle Age superstition often said that red hair was a marker of witchcraft, and a large number of redheads were reported as drowned or burned at the stake during witch trials in Europe.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The movie was only a moderate box office performer in the US. However, it was a much bigger hit overseas, especially in Russia and Germany surprisingly, and had a sequel greenlit thanks to worldwide gross. The overseas gross was three times that of the domestic gross.
• Ham and Cheese: Famke Janssen's Muriel drops line after line of delicious, fatty cheese and she clearly loves every second of it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Hansel actually says "we hunt witches for a living, none of this is normal". Fast forward to Avengers: Age of Ultron and Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye says something similar to Wanda, best known as the Scarlet Witch.
• Incest Yay Shipping: Most fans of Tumblr and Deviant Art have paired Hansel and Gretel together. The short-"haired" witch the siblings capture briefly taunts them with saying they should do this. Neither of them is pleased.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Muriel setting Hansel and Gretel's mother and father to be burnt at the stake and be hanged respectively, despite being completely innocent, especially since the former is a white, and therefore benign witch; in order to separate Gretel from them in order to get her heart.
  • Berringer crosses it when he murders the mayor in front of the townspeople.
• Narm:
  • The giggling, grunting, and rasping from the Horned Witch.
  • The troll's name being Edward.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: It's hard not to see that the siblings' interactions look much like lovers.
• Questionable Casting: Hansel and Gretel look to have only a couple of years' difference between them as children. Flashforward and... well, Jeremy Renner is 15 years older than Gemma Arterton and looks it^note They were eyeing actresses like Noomi Rapace, Diane Kruger and Eva Green, who are at least a little closer in age.. More importantly, this is a completely non-serious movie with shotguns, hideous witches, and ridiculous amounts of blood and gibs. Why didn't anyone get Bruce Campbell for this film?
• So Bad, It's Good: Easily one of the dumbest, yet most entertaining movies of 2013.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: They missed an opportunity to show Sheriff Berringer being present at the burning of Adrianna.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton give an absolutely straight-laced performance despite the Cliché Storm plot.
• Ugly Cute: Edward the troll. He might look threatening, but his puppy-dog eyes are adorable.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The film employs a combination of digital and makeup effects to bring the witches to life. Edward is a completely practical creation.

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