Direction: Robert Zemeckis
Country: USA
Robert Zemeckis, the director who gave us Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, fails to provide adequate entertainment with The Witches, a cinematic flop with serious issues imposing to any valid credentials in the categories of animated fantasy and horror comedy. Anne Hathaway as The Grand High Witch, and Octavia Spencer as a witch-sensitive grandma, star in a flabby adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1983 novel of the same name, which had been successfully tackled by Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now; Walkabout) in 1990.
The script was penned by Zemeckis, Kenya Harris and Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth; The Shape of Water), with the latter being also credited as a co-producer together with Alfonso Cuáron (Gravity; Roma). The narration is by Chris Rock.
The promising beginning quickly morphed into a ridiculous fantasy - an authoritarian Hathaway floats and shouts annoyingly, witches evaporate in the air, kids are transformed into ludicrous mice… everything is so painfully boring. The competent photography by Don Burgess, who has been working intermittently with Zemeckis since Forrest Gump, is not enough to make us waste almost two hours of our time with this terrible mess. Zemeckis and his associates really overdid, losing the sense of focus. This isn’t a fun one to watch, and it’s not even weird enough to make me like it a little.
