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http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,4029,1556577,00.html
Having suffered seven years of career freeze, the director Terry Gilliam might have felt entitled to a warmer reception when he finally returned to the day job. It was not to be.
His comeback film has been mauled by the press ahead of its American release today.
The Brothers Grimm is Gilliam's first completed picture since his 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
In the meantime his most notable appearance was as the hapless star of the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha, which charted - in excruciating detail - the collapse of the film-maker's long-cherished The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp. In the aftermath of that calamity, Gilliam struggled to raise funding for a string of projects and admitted that his confidence was at rock bottom.
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The Brothers Grimm was intended as a riposte to those who suggested that the man behind Time Bandits and Brazil is too unruly and iconoclastic to be entrusted with a large-scale Hollywood production.
Budgeted at about $80m, the flamboyant Gothic concoction stars A-list actors Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as a pair of charlatan siblings who uncover a fairytale curse in the forests of 19th century Germany.
At this year's Cannes film festival, the director admitted that he hoped the film's success would pave the way for another stab at Don Quixote.
"Johnny [Depp] and I made a deal when Quixote collapsed," he told the Guardian. "He said, 'You make a commercial film, I'll make a commercial film and we'll get the money to do Quixote.' He made Pirates [of the Caribbean]. Grimms is my commercial film."
But those plans are now in doubt, with US critics lining up to deride the film. According to Robert Koehler in the film industry newspaper Variety: "The Brothers Grimm is deeply lost in the woods. From its depiction of the German author-kin as conmen to its frenetic and exhausted conclusion there's little appeal, save for those looking for a late August distraction."
In the New York Observer, Rex Reed was still more scathing. "Gilliam has no clear idea what he's doing," he wrote, "so the movie is nothing more than noise, costumes and disjointed special effects."