Salt Lake Tribune Review

The title tells you "The Brothers Grimm" is set in a world of magic and fairy tales. The words flashing across the screen tell you it's set in the early 1800s, in French-occupied Germany during Napoleon's reign.
But the feast of visual oddities and the darkly comic tone tell you where "The Brothers Grimm" is firmly set: Terry Gilliam's fevered brain.
The "Brazil" director and former "Monty Python" animator once again creates a world that is utterly weird and, within its own rules, completely logical. If there were such a place where ghosts and demons walked the forest, this is exactly what it would feel like -- mud, grime, toads and blood included.
It is never stated that the title characters, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger), are the same Grimm brothers who wrote all those famous fairy tales, though it's strongly suggested. When we meet Will and Jacob, they are traveling demon hunters ridding villages of their resident witches. We soon learn they are con artists, staging fake ghostbusting with their henchmen.
Soon the French Army catches the Grimms, and a nasty general (Jonathan Pryce) gives them a choice: Die by torture, or go to a nearby village plagued by a real haunting that has led to 10 girls disappearing. The brothers -- aided by a forest-savvy beauty, Angelika (Lena Headey), and threatened by an oafish Italian officer (Peter Stormare) -- set forth to unravel the mystery, leading them to a wicked queen (Monica Bellucci) with a magic mirror.
The screenplay -- credited to thriller master Ehren Kruger ("The Skeleton Key," "The Ring") with a reported rewrite by Gilliam and his longtime collaborator Tony Grisoni (look for their names in the credits as "dress pattern makers") -- restores the blood and scares to the Grimm Fairy Tales. The big bad wolf is no cute-and-cuddly cartoon, and my what big teeth it has. But there is smartly absurd humor in sights like Angelika getting forest advice from licking a toad she calls Grandmother.
Damon and Ledger make a good pair, with Damon humorously embodying the burly man's-man and Ledger playing against type as the bespectacled nerd. But the best pairing in "The Brothers Grimm" is Gilliam -- coming out of a slump after "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and a famously unlucky attempt at a Don Quixote film -- and material that fits his nonsensical sensibilities.

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