The Witches: Movie Review

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, Chris Rock

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Roald Dahl's The Witches is fairly iconic among kids.

The 2020 version delivers something that's a nice reinvention for the times, but also sadly, isn't iconic enough to last forever.

Relocating the action into the deep South in the 1960s and pitching it as an Us vs Them story with the black people vs the mainly white witches and coating it all with a case of Southern race relations issues give the Robert Zemeckis take on the film a nice contemporary yet timeless edge. The divide of the rich versus poor pull of the tale has never been more in evidence from the opulent costuming of the coven to the treatment of Octavia Spencer's more dowdy clothes.

It helps that Anne Hathaway delivers a truly screen-hogging performance from the get-go.

From her vampy vocals that sound like a bad Russian accent to an extremely physical and lithe performance, the film comes alive when the Grand High Witch is on screen. She exudes menace, never willingly goes over the top, but throws herself 100% into the role - and early scenes with her will deliver some of the CGI nightmarish edges that the film desperately needs and were worthy of with the Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron production touches.

Spencer has an earnestness to her grandma and healer, thrust unexpectedly into a fight and prone to exposition early on to set the scene. But she unwisely becomes sidelined in favour of the CGI animations as the witchified mice take centre stage, after her grandson (Jazhir Bruno) is transformed.

But Zemeckis doesn't seem content to try and push the boat out, opting instead for something sadly generic.

It's here The Witches fails to cast much of a spell as it becomes a formulaic CGI-driven tale of shenanigans.

It's not that Zemeckis fails to deliver on that side of things or made something inherently unwatchable, more that it becomes less of the tale that Roald Dahl made famous.

The wordplay and delicious darkness of the originals, complete with the Quentin Blake illustrations, made the books so famous and so beloved with kids, who were happy to get a scare in among the elegant prose.

Zemeckis instead weaves a short-lived spell after a superlative opening (a snowstorm scene is typical of the kind of promise that's teased early on) sets a tone that's deliciously dark and dangerously close to nightmarish. Hathaway's head witch, complete with Heath Ledger Joker-faced scars, is the sole driver of that, and as mentioned, she seizes and relishes the opportunity gifted to her.

While the 2020 version of The Witches is likely to entrance some of the younger end of the audience - and even frighten them witless - the latest deserves only the success it gets from Hathaway's stunning performance. It may scare up some decent box office numbers, but the spell is far from long-lasting, even if it does bewitch you while the lights are down.