By Despite Kristen Stewart and director Rupert Saunders being pulled from the series after allegations of an affair, bumping up visual effects supervisor Cedric Nicolas-Troyan to debut as director, and the first film getting poor reviews, Snow White and the Huntsman got a sequel.
Despite all odds, The Huntsman: Winter’s War wants to pick up the pieces of its broken series and try to tell a story that can stand on its own and possibly bring more films to come. But seeing how this one turned out, no one’s going to want anymore of this.
The Huntsman: Winter’s War
Director: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
Rating: PG-13
Release Date: April 22, 2016
As its title suggests, The Huntsman: Winter’s War shifts its main focus to its titular huntsman, Eric (Chris Hemsworth). Before the events of the first film, the Evil Queen Raveena (Charlize Theron) had a younger sister named Freya (Emily Blunt). After the death of her daughter, Freya gains ice powers and goes off to form her own kingdom (complete with a ban on love), kidnapping children and training them as huntsman along the way. Eric ends up falling in love with another huntsman, Sara (Jessica Chastain), but Freya puts a stop to that. Then seven years later (and after the events of the first film), Freya vows to get Raveena’s magic mirror and take over Snow White’s kingdom.
Just as with the first film, Winter’s War oozes with style. While some of its visuals borrow heavily from other fantasy worlds (such as the design of the huntsman themselves), costume design is still top notch. Capitalizing on one of the better aspects of the first film, Raveena and Freya’s outfits are outlandish and gaudy in the best way. And although it results in less gaudy but fabulous dresses, the set design has also received an upgrade. Scene settings are more varied and feel more inspired, such as the jungle look of the goblin’s den (and the gold chained gorilla goblins), but there’s a definite lack of budget that knocks the film’s overall presentation down a peg. The film’s CG isn’t always seamless, but the film tries its best to make sure at least the central women look good. At least Winter’s War succeeds in that regard. Because their looks are perfected, Theron and Blunt are free to chew the scenery as they see fit.
And boy does Charlize Theron run the show. It’s just a shame that the film keeps her separated from Blunt for the majority of it. The scenes where she’s allowed to cheesily tear into Blunt’s Freya turns Winter’s War into a fantasy version of Dynasty as the two actresses try to out soap opera each other. It’s the only time Blunt seems bothered enough to try, and her scenes with Theron clearly make Blunt’s performance ring hollow the rest of the time. At least Chris Hemsworth get more to do this time around. The first film was before his breakout in The Avengers, and now he’s got this affable personality which helps ease some of Winter’s War’s more troublesome attempts at humor and personality. But while mostly everyone involved is having a good time, no one really seems to care about what they’re saying. It’s halfhearted throughout.
Winter’s War is further crippled by its poor storytelling. When it succeeds it can be funny, or even compelling, but thanks to its need to clutch to the first film rather than reset everything, the film makes no damn sense for the first thirty minutes or so. Thanks to a weird flashback story then a time jump seven years into the future, everything is rushed. We’re never given the time to invest in Eric and Sara’s relationship because all we get between the two is a few make out sessions (that linger on for a bit too long) before they’re separated. It doesn’t help that Hemsworth and Chastain are clearly phoning it in. Their scenes together seem to take the longest, and their faux scottish accents are so heavy, they’re almost parodic. These scenes make you wonder when Theron’s going to show up again. Given that she’s really only in the film for about 20 minutes, the wait seems even longer. Give up the ghost already and give us a full Charlize Theron ham sandwich, Universal.
The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a piecemeal fantasy that’s just other fairy tales duct taped together into a two hour project. There’s clearly an underlying effort being drowned by everyone’s apathy (there’s not even an effort to keep background skeletons from looking like they were bought in one of those pop up Halloween shops), and Winter’s War barely cares it exists. It just does.
Going in I was hoping Universal re-examined the Huntsman series and kept what worked and threw out what didn’t. But it did the complete opposite. The Huntsman: Winter’s War is less of what we want, and more nonsense we don’t need.