It is not often that I use the words, "one of the worst movie experiences of my life," but I'm about to do just that.
This evening I took mrs. trapeze and our fifteen-year-old daughter to see "Into The Woods" and it was one of the worst movie experiences of my life.
A dog's breakfast.
Unfunny and yet emotionless.
Painful. Especially as regards the music but everything else, as well. Imagine a musical where the creative talent had to be thinking, "Hey, remember all those great musicals of the last fifty years? Let's not do anything like that!"
Will be used in the future by the CIA as part of an enhanced interrogation technique to break the wills of the most hardened prisoners.
There is bad. There is forgettably bad. And then there is, "Please Lord, help me to forget this horribly bad experience," bad. This movie would be that third one.
How anyone had the nerve to release this travesty into movie theaters is a total mystery. They should be tied up in a burlap sack with several rabid badgers. And then burned.
So, no, it should not have gone into theaters. It should not have gone straight to DVD or pay-per-view. All copies should have been burned. Do not watch this. You will be very, very sorry if you do.
I wanted all of the movie characters to die. A lot of them actually did.
I would have gotten up and left after five minutes but my daughter (and her female friend) were seated somewhere else in the theater and I did not want to go and look for them. So mrs. trapeze and I endured it. We should file a lawsuit for pain and suffering.
Johnny Depp can be kinda creepy, right? So, sure...cast him as the Wolf opposite Little Red Riding Hood and make it appear that he wants to (very badly) sexually assault her. He doesn't but it sure looks as if he is fantasizing about a BTK-style serial killing.
Things happen inexplicably in this movie. Some characters die and for no apparent reason come back to life. Others just die for no apparent reason and for no apparent benefit to the plot (such as it is). Sometimes it seems as if the singing will never stop. And then it does and there is dialogue for an extended period of time and you begin to forget that it is supposed to be a musical and then the singing starts up again and you wish it would go back to merely inane dialogue.
Did you ever see, "Hansel & Gretel, Witch Hunters?" I caught it on regular cable a few weeks ago and it was awful. Twenty minutes into this I was wishing very hard that I was watching that movie instead. It made more sense and there was zero atrocious music and singing.
At one point in the movie you are led to believe that it is ending and you think, "Ah, relief...I can leave and put this behind me," only to discover that, no, there is another twenty minutes of torture left. That is just plain cruelty on the part of the producers.
Many years from now if I am not killed unexpectedly I will be on my death bed looking back on my life, remembering the good times and the bad and I can tell you right now that I will remember this movie and the two hours or so of my life that it took from me, wishing I could get them back.
EDIT:
I wrote the above before going to RottenTomatoes to see what the "experts" thought. I suspected that the critics would love it and I was correct. It got a 71% favorable from critics. The audience numbers were less positive at 55%. I know why the critics loved it, it "broke the rules" and "gave a new take on traditional stories" and crap like that. I can even explain why audiences rated it as high as 55%, the "Emperor's New Clothes" syndrome where no one wants to admit that they just got suckered out of the price of admission plus it has all these big name actors so it must be good, right? Well, it isn't. It totally sucks.
Another example of how bad it is: Toward the end of the movie there is a musical number where the surviving characters sing (and literally point) at each other as to how it is their fault that things have turned out as miserably as they have.
I really wanted a forest fire to sweep through "The Woods" and take them all.
EDIT:
Why did I see this? I wanted to see "American Sniper" with mrs. trapeze and let the two teenage girls see this stinker on their own. But, to my eternal regret, "American Sniper" was sold out and there wasn't another movie that would have ended at the same time as this piece of stylized garbage.