2020 / 106m - USA
Fantasy
2.0*/5.0*
The Witches poster

Watches

October 25, 2020

2.0*/5.0*

Zemeckis remaking Roald Dahl's The Witches did sound like a pretty nice idea. Zemeckis has a decent track record of modernizing old classics and with proper backing of guys like Del Toro and CuarĂ³n this was a project with quite a bit of potential. The budget was there too, sadly the results isn't all that.

The film doesn't change too much about the original story except the setting. A young boy gets mixed up in the affairs of a coven of witches, who are planning to get rid of all the children by giving them poisoned candy. Together with his grandmother and two friends the boy devises a counter plan to stop the witches in their tracks.

The CG is quite poor, Hathaway's performance is absolutely dreadful, Chris Rock's voice-over should've been scrapped and the film simply lacks that juicy, slightly overstated atmosphere that is so typical for Dahl's work. The film at least looks nice and colorful, but this should've been so much better. Disappointing.