Heath Ledger and Matt Damon answered the prayers of tweens everywhere by starring as the brothers Grimm in director Terry Gilliam’s exploration of the story behind the fable. They have reason to be excited. After all, they haven’t seen Ledger since June, when he was sponsoring a pack of skate-brats out in California. As for Damon, that guy’s been MIA since The Bourne Supremacy.

The film begins with the two brothers entering a small village in Germany where they have been summoned to help defeat an evil ghost that haunts the village.

The brothers apparently do a good business in ghost-busting – or at least pretending to. As it turns out, they are scam artists. They only claim to have defeated the ghosts.

Eventually, the law catches on. The Grimms are given the option to help exorcize a ghost in another small village, or be sentenced to death. What would you do?

And so the brothers are left with the task of destroying a real ghost, something they have never actually done. But somehow, they manage to pull it off.

The Brothers Grimm begins well. Gilliam works appealing new twists on classic fairy tales.

However, the film quickly loses its velocity. Comic relief starts to overtake the plot. Instead of spicing up a few scenes with jokes, humor becomes an obsession. For an action/adventure film, there were far too many laughs coming from the audience.

But the worst parts aren’t the jokes – they’re actually the action sequences. The repetitive action scenes are not only boring, they’re derivative of films like Van Helsing and The Wolf Man. Ultimately, the most exciting part of the film was when the cell phone of the girl sitting next to me rang.

The end of the film was just as weak as the action scenes. The evil villain is defeated, everyone lives happily ever after, blah blah blah. With few plot twists to alleviate the predicable plot, the ending was something to look forward to.

I can’t recommend The Brothers Grimm to you – but your little sister might like it.