BRAVE

BRAVE (2012)

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You know, I'm thinking this entire movie would've significantly improved by just having trash mobs for BRAVE to fight with her bow. She and her suddenly bear companion entered an untamed forest, so they could've fought bandits there. Merida fell into a ruin full of skeletons, so those bags of bones could've come to life. The bear ripped a grate off a secret sewer entrance just ripe for sewer slime slicing. You following me? Like just have these two do fucking anything. I don't really understand why the film sets up fantastical elements like witchery and spellcraft just to have mom and daughter dick around in empty woods and a lifeless castle. With rich, juicy writing, any single setting can work, but since there's really no juice, and there's not really any real action or teeth to it either... what's the point? I mean, why does this movie even exist the way it does?

Well, the answer lies in what WIKIPEDIA describes as troubled development. It appears the woman directly involved with BRAVE's creation, Brenda Chapman, was booted off the project for 'creative differences' with long-time Pixar sex offender John Lasseter. That's hilarious because I'm really trying to understand what the creative integrity of the fucking CARS II director looks like. Anyway, she gets replaced with Mark Andrews, who went on to say this horseshit about his own role:

"The bones of the film were totally fine. That was not the issue. What was hanging off the bones, there were problems. There were things that were not working. The focuses and balances that were out of whack."

If there was anything out of whack, Andrews took the fucking car buffer to it. Gave everything a nice, impotent rounded edge. Very pathetic, and there's really not much else to say. Stopped this one an hour in, far more than it deserves.