Chris Hemsworth’s Awful Fantasy Movie Is Somehow Crushing On Netflix
These days, Chris Hemsworth is most well known for his portrayal of Thor, but in between Marvel movies, he played a crucial role in two films based on the German fairy tale Snow White. Coming off the commercial success of 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman, Hemsworth reprised his role for a 2016 film that functioned as both a prequel and sequel, The Huntsman: Winter’s War. Though this film was widely considered to be a critical and commercial flop, FlixPatrol reports that it’s currently the seventh most streamed film on Netflix this week, and people are giving it another look.
Though The Huntsman: Winter’s War was praised for its casting choices and stellar visual effects, even Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Emily Blunt, and Jessica Chastain couldn’t escape the fate of a 19 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Chris Hemsworth led sequel The Huntsman: Winter’s War is racing up the streaming charts on Netflix.
The prevailing critical consensus is that the film was well acted and executed, but was wholly unnecessary in its storytelling. In other words, Winter’s War was the sequel that nobody really needed, but got anyway.
The narrative centers around Queen Freya (Emily Blunt), an ice queen, and her quest to kill parents so she could train their orphaned children for her army. Despite her efforts to teach her army of children to avoid the pains of love, a pain that she suffered when her lover Andrew murdered her child, Chris Hemsworth’s Eric and Jessica Chastain’s Sara fall in love and marry anyway.
At this time, Eric was the best huntsman in Freya’s rankings, and when he was gifted Sara’s mother’s medallion necklace as a symbol of her love, they planned to escape from Queen Freya’s reign and live a free life together.
But when Freya finds out about their newly formed romance, she takes action by having Eric beaten and thrown into a river. Eric survives, and is under the impression that Sara has been killed because he was shown an illusion that depicted her death. One of the primary throughlines in The Huntsman: Winter’s War involves the deception that both Chris Hemsworth and Jessica Chastain’s characters have to work their way through in their attempts to stop Freya’s reigning rule of malicious powers.
The prevailing critical consensus is that the film was well acted and executed, but was wholly unnecessary in its storytelling.
Though this sounds like an inherently compelling narrative, critics have asserted that Chris Hemsworth’s and Jessica Chastain’s chemistry was hindered due to their inability to successfully portray a Scottish accent, which made their line delivery fall flat, causing the film to suffer a great deal.
The Huntsman: Winter’s War also suffered from trying to function as a prequel and a sequel at the same time. We see Chris Hemsworth put his best foot forward to establish Eric’s above-mentioned origin story.
Then the film quickly jumps forward several years so we could see him go on his mission to recover Ravenna’s (Snow White’s evil stepmother) magic mirror. It could be said that Winter’s War fell flat by trying to cover too much ground with too short of a run time.
Instead of doing a proper prequel treatment and then having a subsequent sequel, The Huntsman: Winter’s War feels a bit cramped despite all of the great storytelling elements that it boasts.
In an ideal world, we could have seen Chris Hemsworth lean more into the earlier characterization that we see at the top of the film, and further development of the plot line could very well have made the film feel less rushed. If this approach was taken, it would only make sense for this story to be developed into a trilogy, which would have probably fared better on both the critical and commercial front.
The existing iteration, however, performed poorly, only bringing in $165 million off a budget of $115 million. This is a far cry from Snow White and the Huntsman, which brought in almost $400 million with a similar budget.
It could be said that Winter’s War fell flat by trying to cover too much ground with too short of a run-time.
So clearly, this Chris Hemsworth sequel got the green light because of how well its predecessor performed. But Winter’s War suffered from trying to cover too much ground in a short amount of time.
All criticism aside, we’d venture to say that Chris Hemsworth’s more recent successes at the box office (Thor: Love and Thunder) have inspired fans to give the film a second look, and The Huntsman: Winter’s War has something going for it aside from its storytelling.
Fans overwhelmingly agree that the special effects steal the show despite the film’s other shortcomings. Given how well The Huntsman: Winter’s War is currently performing on FlixPatrol, you may want to check it out on Netflix because it was an ambitious film at the time of its release, and it’s certainly turning some heads in 2023.
