“The Brothers Grimm” is a dull, murky, confusing mess, and it’s hard to see what director Terry Gilliam might have been hoping to achieve by its creation.

The movie fictionalizes the lives of the famous fairy-tale authors Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm; the idea is that the brothers made their living traveling through the German countryside perpetrating supernatural hoaxes based on folktales. They would then save the frightened villagers from whichever witch/troll/X-file they had concocted, for a handsome fee.

The movie then goes on to have the occupying French army conscript the brothers to fight an actual evil in the form of an enchanted forest that has been abducting children. Mayhem and lunacy ensue.
The premise does not inspire confidence, but this is Terry Gilliam, after all. He’s made some of the best movies in the whole world, with only a few missteps: “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” “Time Bandits,” “The Meaning of Life,” “Brazil,” “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” “The Fisher King” and “Twelve Monkeys.”

While the shabby, muddy world, eccentric villagers and spastic characters are familiar, “The Brothers Grimm” otherwise inherits nothing from this lineage. The humor is forced and flat, the action feels staged and pointless, and the story is contrived and puzzling.

There are moments when we start to relax and think that we may just be watching an off-beat, low-energy farce—such as when a torture device accidentally splatters kitten-bits all around the torture chamber, which is fun—but then a minute later one brother Grimm is lamenting to the other brother Grimm how he’s never believed in him and blah blah blah and the movie tries to draw us into their relationship as brothers, or to explore the nature of belief and stories, and we realize that we’re actually supposed to care about these characters. But we don’t care about the characters or their silly world or what they say, so we’re bored and dismayed.

The script is like a blender full of fairytale pieces all reimagined, recombined and reanimated, except badly, with poor effects and no purpose. The characters scamper back and forth between two sets—the woods and the village—and that’s about it.

Without studying Terry Gilliam’s life, it’s hard to understand how this could have happened. Drugs? Insanity? Did 2002’s catastrophic experiences with “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” a Gilliam-directed movie that was never made but which actually inspired a documentary about the production problems that plagued it (including the death of its star), actually break him in some way? Or did he have to make this movie to pay off some kind of debt, possibly to a loan shark?

I’m not kidding. It’s an irredeemably bad movie, and its existence is a mystery.

director: Terry Gilliam
writer: Ehren Kruger
starring: Matt Damon, Heath Ledger
rated: PG-13 by the MPAA for “violence, frightening sequences and brief suggestive material”