Perhaps the first surrealist buddy-pic slapstick horror/fantasy story for kids, it can at least be recommended as unique, and seems destined to stay that way. If the executives feared another Clifford-sized dog, it's perhaps because Grimm looks eerily like Munchausen in places, but without its charm and wonder.

The Grimm Brothers (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) are reinvented as con men, hoodwinking superstitious, slack-jawed villagers with the help of a comically skinny man Hidlick (Mackenzie Crook from The Office), and comically fat man Bunst (Richard Ridings). Captured by a Napoleonic general (Jonathan Pryce), they are then forced to confront a real witch. Like Van Helsing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Brothers Grimm works on the dubious premise that a grab-bag of existing stories can be cobbled together into some kind of super-story. Drawing muddled elements from ‘Little Red Riding Hood', ‘Sleeping Beauty', ‘Hansel and Gretel', and ‘Rapunzel', the result is more like ‘Frankenstein'; where a genius stitches together a collection of disparate parts and tries to bring them to life, only to create an out-of-control monster.

The whole mess might have held together if the centre had a bit more gravity. But the two leads are given watery characterizations (not helped by Damon's accent, which goes on a tour of the British Isles via Boston), fleshed out only with some unconvincing pop psychology. Their likeable sidekicks are dispatched early on, and they spend the remainder of the film accompanied a torturer named Calvadi, a walking, talking Italian stereotype not seen since the last music hall went bust. Weighed down with stilettos and spaghettiameatballs accent, Peter Stormare almost polishes the turd, but why this dinosaur was resurrected in the first place is a both a mystery and a Jurassic Park-style "let sleeping dogs lie" lesson for us all.

Because of a script only reworked, not written, by Gilliam, his trademarked touches - the broad, dark humour, the bizarre characters - aren't so much additions as addenda, and more often than not they just peel off the pedestrian narrative surface of the rest of the film. In the refreshingly candid director's commentary, Gilliam admits that he was working with a script "he didn't like", and if there were any doubts what he thought of the finished product, they are dispelled by his comments over the opening credits: "I'm Terry Gilliam, and I suppose I'm responsible for some of what you see here."

Extras: director's commentary; deleted scenes with optional commentary; two "making of" documentaries