There are a few things the discerning monster needs to know about Miramax's The Brothers Grimm. Will (Matt Damon) is the handsome one. Jake (Heath Ledger) is the one in the glasses who was in charge of getting money for their dying sister and is the reason why this movie isn't called The Siblings Grimm. And Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam is the one directing the whole mess.

Had I known that last bit before the end credits, I wouldn't have wasted all that time trying to follow a non-existent plot.

We're in France-occupied Germany, where the French have French accents and the Germans have English ones, even when they're played by Americans. (All this pseudo-culture makes everyone really hard to understand). Children are disappearing from a small village, and only Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm can save them. Why? I don't know. It probably has something to do with the pyrotechnics in the plays they put on. The brothers can create and destroy all kinds of monsters in these performances, and, as everyone knows, special effects wizards make great detectives.

Writers search for small children. That's the story. All of it.

The rest of the movie tries to answer a question that this small bit of plot doesn't ask: How many fairy tales can be stuffed into two hours? There are references to or cameos by Cinderella, Jack (of Beanstalk fame), Little Red Riding Hood, the Gingerbread Man, Hansel and Gretel, the evil queen, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, who are all, in fact, the same person. What we have here is a B-movie with an A-list budget, and those movies are the very worst kind.

Like some guy on the subway who tries to mask a weeks' worth of body odor with a bottle of Axe body spray, The Brothers Grimm tries to cover up its absent narrative by having lots of things happen. Kittens get kicked into whirling blades. Someone ties Jake and Will to horses, then lights their tails on fire. Another horse gulps down a good-sized child in one bite. A girl with no face gropes for her own eyeballs, which are stuck in well sludge. And bugs crawl out of everywhere. Two or three of these images are pretty impressive--there's a "living forest" that would make Sam Raimi proud--but mostly they just made me ask more questions than the movie could answer. Why, for example, are we in the woods one minute and at a dinner party for the French soldiers the next? Is the French general Napoleon or not? (If he is, he's awfully tall). Isn't that kid supposed to be dead?

After seeing The Brothers Grimm, I'm still not sure what it's about. Its strongest impression on me was only of other movies: Shakespeare in Love, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Van Helsing. (This last one is itself a "greatest hits" version of Universal's classic horror catalogue). The Brothers Grimm is not a good horror movie, or a good fantasy movie. It's not a good fairy-tale movie, either, especially when you take the Shrek series into account.

What we're left with is a bunch of people who were given a ton of money to make a pretty film. I just wish they'd made a good one as well.