Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

"Hansel and Gretel: With Hunters" is just as stupid as it sounds, yet it's an endearing kind of stupid.

It's a little engine that can't, but thinks it can, thinks it can, thinks it can, until it slides backwards into the trainyard and explodes everything. By the end of the film, director and creator Tommy Wirkola has filled a little world with characters and scenarios that amuse you despite good taste. One wonders if the train was meant to wreck itself all along.

"H&G"'s target audience is 15-year olds looking for some light violence after a night playing "Call of Duty." Hansel (Jeremy Renner) runs around with a big, thick gun, alternatively killing monsters and laying cute redheaded women, while Gretel (Gemma Arterton) flips around in leather so tight it would make a "Matrix" character blush. The humor alternates one-for-one between immature source-material twisting, like Hansel having diabetes, and characters looking at a daunting task and saying a four-letter word.

The story? Hansel and Gretel, classic Grimm fairy tale characters, grow up and kill witches while dealing with the psychological repercussions of their traumatic childhood experiences in the candy house. You know how it goes. What you might not expect is that "H&G" is actually the best cinematic use of the contemporary mash-up formula popularized by "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." It creates a world and sticks to it, honoring the source material and not getting too gritty. Last year's "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" was self-serious without cleverly appropriating the life and legend of Lincoln beyond his name. In "H&G," we see a fairytale land not unlike those illustrated in your children's book.

A lot more blood, though.

What makes me like "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" most is that it is made in earnest. The cheese is executed without cynicism or self-reference. The boneheaded plot doesn't take itself too seriously, and appearances by Peter Stormare and Famke Janssen as the cackling villains are fun and hammy. While Arterton spends way too much time as a damsel in distress for my tastes, she still plays more of a role in the action than I expected. And her voice. I'd never heard it before, but it's has a gravelly quality that you wouldn't want to hear behind you on a dark night.

The best part? The entire film clocks in at an inoffensive 86 minutes. If you're looking for some cheesy absurdity, you can do much, much worse.