The Brothers Grimm

Grimm by name, grim by nature.

It would be hard to underestimate the disappointment that Terry Gilliam fans will feel watching this film. Is the master of imagination and the prince of left field sedated in a dark room beyond the glare of blazing expectation?

The only way to explain this monstrous mess of a movie is to believe that its director overdosed on CGI, which affected his judgement.

The Grimm brothers collected folktales at the beginning of the 19th century and published them in many volumes. They included famous standards, such as Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap (Little Red Riding Hood), and a reputation spread throughout upper-class nurseries in England, soon to be charmed by Hans Christian Anderson, that their Fairy Tales would raise the hairs on the back of your neck. In those days, sentimentality had not become an essential ingredient in children's literature and, according to nightshirted little boys and girls too scared to come out from under the eiderdown, the Grimms were the real thing.

In Gilliam's film, they are illusionists and charlatans, faking hauntings in order to make a fortune as ghostbusters. Will (Matt Damon) is the confidence trickster, the good-looking front man, and Jacob (Heath Ledger), the shy, bespectacled scholar who finds girls as baffling as sea horses. The mood is knockabout farce, with overacting compulsory - the best exponent of this being Peter Stormare, as an Italian torturer, working for the French occupational force, under the sadistic heel of General Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce) - and falling into water or from heights being the equivalent of pantomime custard pies.

Delatombe orders the brothers to the village of Marbaden, where young girls have disappeared into what locals call "the enchanted forest". Will suspects a competitor in the paranormal fakery business, but after entering the woods and witnessing weird things, like walking trees, he tells Jacob, "These people are better funded than we are."

In fact, the forest is truly spooked and at the top of the tower in a clearing lies the preserved corpse of an old hag, who was once the most beautiful queen (Monica Bellucci) in all the world ("Mirror, Mirror on the wall"). At this moment, the wizard of Computer Generated Imagery sprinkles fairy dust in Terry's eyes and the film becomes a special-0effects orgy, as the plot implodes and a living blob of mud mutates into a life-sized Gingerbread Man.

Damon has no feel for comedy. He smiles a lot, has good teeth and looks completely lost. Ledger, unrecognisable as the one time Aussie teen heartthrob, does an excellent job as a baffled boy/man, who goes along with whatever's expected of him, although it is Damon who licks the live toad. The token totty is Lena Headey, looking intense and serious, as "the great hunter", whose father was seduced by the forest and became a wolf, although she doesn't find out about this until near the end ("Daddy? Is that you?").

Can it be possible, you ask yourself, that the ex-Python who made such seminal movies as Brazil, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen and The Fisher King is responsible for this complete load of tosh? No. The real Terry Gilliam was abducted by aliens and a CGI clone took his place on the film set. Hopefully, this state of arrested imagination is only temporary.