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Darkness lurks over more than the forest in 'The Brothers Grimm'

"Troubled productions" — those film shoots where directors and number-crunchers clash, or actors leave in a huff, or things fall apart in less predictable ways — are a problem. Not only for those who earn gray hair and ulcers by enduring them, but for those of us trying to decide how to respond to the compromised film that finally makes its way to the screen.

Do we reject it as unworthy of a favorite artist's filmography? (The public usually never learns about production difficulties unless a high-profile player — a Scorsese, a Cruise, a tabloid couple with a name like Brenniferina — is involved.) Or do we scour the movie for scraps of personality and overpraise them, knowing in our hearts that this is what the movie really was, before They messed it up?

Dimension Films 'The Brothers Grimm' 2 out of 5 stars Director: Terry Gilliam Starring: Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Monica Bellucci, Jonathan Pryce, Lena Headey Release date: August 26, 2005 Rating: PG-13 for violence, frightening sequences and brief suggestive material. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "The Brothers Grimm"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

It's a dilemma familiar to the followers of Terry Gilliam — the director who, if he hasn't written the book on troubled productions, has at least starred in the movie. (2002's "Lost In La Mancha" documented the epic misfortunes befalling his never-completed "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.")

Gilliam's "The Brothers Grimm" is an above-average fantasy/adventure, if judged against generic Hollywood product. Held against the standard of what it might have been, it's a big disappointment.

The setup is classic Gilliam material: Two hucksters, who make a living by exploiting old folk tales and superstitions, must become heroes when faced with actual witchcraft. Will (the charmer) and Jacob (the scholar) Grimm go from village to village in 19th-century Germany, rigging up fake ghosts or ogres and then getting paid to vanquish them.

The occupying French forces are onto their game, though, and send Cavaldi (Peter Stormare in a hilarious fit of overacting) to offer them a choice: Die by slow torture, or go solve another presumed hoax, in which the young girls in a small village are disappearing one by one. Understandably, they choose the latter. Unfortunately, the disappearances aren't a hoax.

The film's shift from comedy to supernatural mystery comes disappointingly early; a lot of potential laughs are left behind when the brothers enter the big dark forest. But spooky forests are also fertile ground for Gilliam, and the director clearly relishes reintroducing some darker vibes to familiar fairy-tale icons such as Little Red Riding Hood. The movie is occasionally truly frightening; plagues of spiders and a disturbing Gingerbread Man would surely be too much for many young viewers to take.

When this second mode is jettisoned as well, though — near-horror giving way to storm-the-castle, kill-the-witch bluster — the movie simply becomes too jumbled to hold together. Like Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" (a tale with similar themes by another filmmaker whose genius for style isn't always matched by solid storytelling skills), it works so hard to get little things right that it loses sight of the big picture.

Gilliam's devotees will have no problem attributing flaws to outside factors. The filmmaker was working with an unusually large budget, for instance, but the unconvincing look of some computer graphics here suggests that he could have used even more resources in the special-effects department. The casting — imposed on the director by studio heads — is not very good, and Gilliam's attempt to make star Matt Damon more appropriate for the part with some prosthetic makeup was shot down the day before shooting began. Ehren Kruger's screenplay (however much it was tweaked on the set) has no zing.

But Gilliamites will treasure small moments that let them extrapolate their own ideal version of the tale, and casual moviegoers will surely appreciate a film that at its worst is far more enjoyable than the numbingly dumb "Van Helsing."

The best news for Terry Gilliam fans, though, isn't in "The Brothers Grimm" at all: Gilliam's "Tideland" — the smaller, more personal project he ran off to make when "Grimm" hit one too many studio snags — is debuting next month at the Toronto Film Festival and, with any luck, will come our way very soon.