Thoroughly unsatisfying movie

Well stated. If this movie had a scent to it, it would smell like bigfoot's d!ck covered with Indian food and all wrapped up in a dirty diaper pita.

That's Terry Gilliam, guys. Even going back to his first film, 'Jabberwocky', he has subverted the traditional heroic characters by making them decidedly less than heroic.

I mean, at that point it sounds like the fault is more on you for not just accepting that this isn't a Spielberg-type movie and going with the story the movie was actually trying to tell. This rant just reads like the equivalent of "I read a book by Charles Dickens today and it was rubbish! Nothing like how Stephanie Meyer writes!" The two are completely different in style on an almost fundamental level and are never going to be compatible with each other. At a certain point, the audience has to take some responsibility for not spending the time constantly trying to fit a round peg in a square hole.

Terry Gilliam's primary style can basically be summed up as "subversion". Subversion of character tropes, story tropes, even basic film-making. That's present in all his films, including this one. You're right, going into the film we expect the brothers to be heroes but we're very quickly told that it's not going to be the case - that's one of the reasons why the film starts by showing Jake as a naive idiot who squanders his sister's life for the sake of magic beans and Will physically attacks him for it. And then, in case we as the audience dismiss the behaviour as being excused because the two are children at the time, Gilliam again proves to us that nothing has really changed with either of them in the very first sequence after the prologue when the pair con an entire village. And even as they gradually do (inadvertently) become more heroic as the film progresses, those initial unheroic character traits never fully go away because Gilliam likes characters who are like real people in that sense: sure, they can grow somewhat but it will take more than a 90-minute runtime for them to truly change who they are. And again, that's the same in all his movies. His characters rarely have an arc in the traditional sense of starting off as one thing and ending it as something else - it's more that they simply begin to display the potential for change.

I was hoping the film would be funny and cute, what a disappointment .

I have two big issues with this film:

1.) It's really gritty, dark, and dirty (literally). It takes every fairy-tale involved and makes them as rough and gritty as possible, including having the characters covered in mud for half the film (and one child was eaten by a gingerbread person made of mud!)

2.) The idea was good, but the execution was terrible. I thought it would be awesome for the Brothers Grimm to be two young, conmen who were tricking people into thinking they were vanquishing "supernatural" problems, and they learn how to be better people through having to deal with the genuine article.

There were a lot of areas in this film that hit the wrong notes. The humor fell flat, the story was choppy once they got to the village being menaced by the evil Queen, some parts were just plain disgusting, and the "love triangle" between the brothers and Angelika (this was the very first time I actually saw Lena Headley, by the way) was very weaksauce and didn't go anywhere.

The only things memorable about it were the Mirror Queen's incredible costume, and Angelika being reunited with her sisters at the end.