eric262003 According to legend, the reason why Rupert Sanders and Kristen Stewart were blackballed from "The Huntsman: Winter's War" was due to the esoteric affair they had during the 2012 film "Snow White and the Huntsman". I'll take it as a possibility. But if that's the case then why were all but two members of the Seven Dwarfs return and the other five didn't get called back? Granted their absentees didn't matter much, "The Huntsman: Winter's War" proves to be nothing more than a sequel that lacks fresh ideas or any creative merits that was never needed to be filmed and was just an excuse to carry it as a potential franchise. Here we go again.Chris Hemsworth returns as Eric the Huntsman and is once again on the brink of another epic battle with the evil Ravenna (Charlize Theron) and has brought along her younger sister Freya (Emily Blunt) to the scene. Freya has less baggage of wrath than her sister and has converted to evilness due to the loss of child by her killer ex-lover. Feeling that love is non-existent, Freya gather a platoon of highly-skilled fighters located in her ice castle. These fighters were once children who were once kidnapped and were trained to become deadly warriors to the point of being quite the untouchables once they reached adulthood. One of them is Eric (Hemsworth) the fighter who was instrumental in helping Snow White defeat Ravenna, The other is Sara (Jessica Chastain) another strong fighter whom Eric is in love with.Prior to his supposed death scene for breaking Freya's no-love compromise, Eric is thrown from a cliff but survives, but his lover sadly is placed to her death. The story then follows up from the events of the first installment as Eric was assigned from orders of the King by an ill Queen Snow White, to retrieve the magic mirror which was an integral part of Ravenna's pompous ways of exploiting her beauty was stolen. So Eric is joined by the comical dwarfs Nion (Nick Frost) and Gryff (Rob Brydon), they set out to find the mirror before Ravenna does and uses it for her evil purposes.While it does have a very in depth look at Eric's origins, 'The Huntsman: Winter's War" doesn't have much going for it plus the sole purpose this movie was made was to put a hole through our wallets and to start a potential franchise. There's no wide open expansion in their universe, the atmosphere is opaque and dreary though tone here seems more lighter than anticipated. Hemsworth was all right as the leading protagonist and does well with the material that was given to him. But his charisma is quite limited in a role that requires a vast amount of it and to make matters worse, he's forced into speaking in an unorthodox accent which he's intended to sound Scottish, but it weaves to sound closer to Irish on and off. Freya as a villainous is quite unconvincing as she's porttrayed as being just generally depressed over full-blown evil. Things start to heat up one Ravenna enters the fray by the the time the movie is half-over. By then it's too little too late and there's really not much to do to set the tone of this film. Even Theron's presence with her icy complexion and her flawless beauty could save this film.

meraioana The movie is OK on its own...sort of. It just feels so disjointed from the previous one. Even the feel of it is off. I wish they wouldn't have warped the entire story and I believe they should have still gone with Stewart despite the scandal. I thoroughly enjoyed Snow White and the Huntsman, where the huntsman had a connection to her...while here, the romance seems flimsy and lacks depth, the imagery is off as well, everything is way too happy - you can easily tell it's a different director. Furthermore, because of the feelings he made known in the previous film, the huntsman's relationship his 'beloved' feels false and forced. Basically, if they weren't going to carry on with the tone and direction of the initial movie, they should have just left it alone.

James Hitchcock You've heard of "Hamlet" without the Prince. Now we have "Snow White" without the Princess. "The Huntsman: Winter's War" is, officially, both a prequel and sequel to "Snow White and the Huntsman"- the action takes place both before and after the events of the first film- but Snow White does not actually appear in it, even though she is mentioned on a couple of occasions. The film also borrows a few ideas from "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen, or possibly from "Frozen", the Disney adaptation of Andersen's story.Although Snow White does not appear, Charlize Theron's evil Queen Ravenna returns from the earlier film. The main villainess, however, is Ravenna's younger sister Freya, who rules her own kingdom, a land of ice and snow, in the far north, and who remains in power even after Ravenna has been overthrown. As the title implies, Chris Hemsworth's Huntsman also returns. We learn that, in this context, the word "Huntsman" does not necessarily mean "man who hunts animals". The Huntsmen are the elite troops of Freya's army, trained in the arts of war from childhood, and Hemsworth's character, Eric, is one of these. He incurs Freya's displeasure, however, when he falls in love with a female Huntsman, Sara. (Freya's army is an equal opportunities employer). As Freya has replaced the Ten Commandments with one of her own, "thou shalt not love", Eric is banished from the kingdom and Sara put to death.I won't set out the rest of the plot because it is essentially a mish-mash of clichés drawn from every sword-and-sorcery adventure you've ever seen. I said above that the film borrows from "The Snow Queen"; it also borrows heavily- as do most modern sword-and-sorceries- from "Lord of the Rings", both Tolkien's novel and Peter Jackson's three films. Like "Lord of the Rings" it revolves around an evil ruler trying to get his/her hands on a magical artefact, in this case Ravenna's magic mirror, which will give him/her immense power. In both cases the aforesaid evil ruler is opposed by an assorted group of good guys, in this case Eric and a few dwarfs, both male and female. (It is a general rule of the fantasy genre that dwarfs and elves are good, trolls and goblins evil). Besides the dwarfs, Eric also has the assistance of Sara, rumours of whose death prove to have been much exaggerated. (That's not a spoiler. No film company is going to hire a major star like Jessica Chastain and kill her off in the first reel).Although this is officially an American film, only one of the actors playing the main characters is American; Hemsworth is Australian, Theron South African and Emily Blunt (Freya) British. The one exception is Chastain, and even she does not sound American. Like a number of the other characters she speaks her lines in what is supposed to be a Scottish accent. Now I was not worried that some of these accents were not completely accurate- the action takes place in a fairy-tale fantasy world, not in the real Scotland- but I did wonder why an American studio were making a film using accents that many American viewers would have difficulty with.I never really thought of Blunt as being a Charlize Theron look-alike, but here the two actresses are made up to look convincingly similar; you could certainly take them for sisters. Where Blunt has difficulty is in trying to suggest a difference in personality. The script suggests that, unlike the bad-through-and-through Ravenna, Freya may not be completely evil and that she may have a softer side to her character, although she keeps it well hidden. (Ravenna, for example, would probably have killed both Eric and Sara outright rather than letting them live). Blunt never, however, really suggests this in her portrayal; the most that comes across is that Freya is only 99% evil, which is not such a big improvement on the full hundred. Theron herself was rather splendid in "Snow White and the Huntsman", but does not make the same impression here.I am old enough to remember just how bad fantasy films could be in the pre-Jackson era. (Think, if you can bear to, of "Conan the Barbarian" or "Prince Valiant"). Even otherwise distinguished directors could make fools of themselves when they ventured into this territory, Ridley Scott's "Legend" and Richard Fleischer's spectacularly awful "Red Sonja" being cases in point Admittedly, in the 2010s no film could get away with special effects as inadequate as those used in "Red Sonja" and other eighties adventures, and those in "The Huntsman: Winter's War" are generally well done, but that is no more than we have come to expect from the genre in recent years. Visual effects alone, however, are not enough; those film-makers who want to emulate Jackson's achievement need a story as good as Tolkien's, a literate script and first-class acting, and those are all qualities in which this film is deficient. "Snow White and the Huntsman" is not in the "Lord of the Rings" class, but it still has plenty to enjoy. Not so its successor. 4/10

greatestreviewerever That's all I feel it is worthy of stating in this review. If you're super bored and there is seriously NOTHING else on or in your libraries at your fingertips - watch this. Otherwise literally watch anything else. Well not anything else, there are movies I would rate under a 3, but there are an infinite (yeah) amount 3.1 & up.