Avengers Grimm: Time Wars

This is truly a awesome movie, the only things it misses before I rate it as a 10 is; A proper script. A casting crew that's not sleeping. A director that know what directing means. Actors that can act. Actually its faster to list whats good with the movie, not that I can think of anything at the moment. After watching the first movie I was sure its was impossible to make a follow up that could be worse, but I was wrong. If you liked the first you SHOULD watch this one too. But you should look for a cinema with "Full satisfaction or get your money back!" warranty, you will thank me later...

While I have some fun with it, it's still a bad movie. The story is unfocused and a complete mess with Magda the Mad wanting to marry the prince in order to rule something while a group of fairy tale character team up to stop her. They get sent back in time which nothing interesting happen and where they spend a lot of time. The pacing is really awful on how things happened pretty quickly and it feels like it rushing itself. The fight scenes are extremely bad with it happening quickly and the choreography is really bad. The characters themselves are nothing to write about because all of them are generic. I do like the performance of Rumpelstiltskin who gives off a overtop villain who is the only enjoyable character in the entire movie. Alice and Mad Hatter are fine, but don't appear that much in the movie. Red and Sleeping Beauty are just there to help out. Prince Charming spends a lot of time captured and his acting gets old quickly. Snow White is your standard badass female lead who isn't that memorable. And Magda the Mad plays your typical villain. The movie ends in a anticlimactic way.

Avengers Grimm: Time Wars has some cheesy moments, but has a ton of problems with it.

Advances in technology have made camera gear & cgi animation affordable and accessible to just about anyone. This movie shows that writing, acting, editing, action, stunt work... still out of reach for most. How do these things get funded? And can I get a cup of that money to make a terrible film?

Odd mildly watchable effort aside, The Asylum's near-universally maligning is more than well deserved. Despite a vast majority of their films being weak or worse, many are irredeemably terrible, there is something compulsive about their badness and the curiosity as to whether they are capable of churning out a film that rises above okay. To me they have done, but very, very sporadically.

The first 'Avengers Grimm' film was very poor, containing one of the studio's best ever ideas but unfortunately as one can deduce an idea ruined by near-disastrous, but not unwatchable, execution. 'Avengers Grimm: Time Wars' is even worse, the idea for the story no longer feels fresh and further marred by the telling of it being messy. That is in terms of story, elsewhere very little to no effort could be seen, which really annoys me when watching a film and that is when the lowest rating is given out (of which this is one of the more deserving recipients of it recently). It is not to be confused with the infinitely superior 'Avengers: Infinity War', which is actually a good, no great, film and the film that this capitalises upon and probably will be. Anybody who disliked that film, and there are a fair share about, are likely to find themselves appreciating it if they saw this.

Elizabeth Eileen is the one person in the cast to show signs of trying or confidence, though unfortunately her bad dialogue and the way Red is written, with the film doing nothing to make her interesting, works against her so can hardly consider her a redeeming quality. In the previous 'Avengers Grimm', Rumpelstiltskin was the one character that film tried to develop, not so here with the character descending into cheesy villain territory and Eric Feltes spending his entire screen time looking uncomfortable and like he couldn't be bothered. Cannot say anything good about any of the other actors who fare even worse, with as annoying a Snow White and deadweight a Sleeping Beauty as one can get.

All the characters are incredibly dull and the way they act and behave with each other or decision making makes them dumb too. Not an interesting or rootable one in the bunch. It is too kind calling the dialogue toe-curlingly horrid, and even the worst amateur actors would be embarrassed even reading them let alone uttering them. Once again, the concept is wasted, with the worst aspect of the story being that everything with the time wars is incredibly convoluted to the point of incoherence. The sluggish pace, the insulting amount of ridiculousness, the uneventfulness of the non-action scenes and the disastrously done action sequences further make the story a mess.

What made the action disastrous was that they were far from thrilling, confusingly choreographed, performed with no real engagement or ease with it, sloppy editing and a pedestrian pace. Any doubles too were obvious. 'Avengers Grimm: Time Wars' is directed with no competence, has a soundtrack that is too often too loud and too quirky which jars with the 'darker' (in quote marks because the movie is little more than tired cheese throughout) moments and looks cheap. The basic sets are the least bad aspect, faring worse were the drab and going-through-the-motions-like photography, the continuity-error-laden haphazard editing, too dark lighting and very afterthought-looking special effects.

Summarising, awful. 1/10

If it's got "Asylum" on the credits, it's a dud, every time. Potential viewers be warned: this is no different than typical Asylum schlock. Neither funny nor entertaining... but amazingly not as bad as most Asylum films.

The acting is so-so, not as bad as everyone might present considering the budget, short production time and terrible directing. The script is terrible, which gives the actors little to work with. I actually rather enjoyed the part of Rumple; he was properly villainous. Mag was over-the-top villainous, which such parts require. Mad Hatter and Alice were moderately tolerable. Sleeping Beauty was a blonde bimbo present only for eye candy. Prince Charming was ridiculously and properly hero-prone. Red was fairly cute and decently acted (for a limited-part stone-cold assassin).

The time travel theme and special effects were neither as bad nor as confusing as some have claimed in reviews. The time travel part was actually rather simplistic as far as such plots go. It's Asylum; no one expects cerebral out of them. I don't really understand how other reviewers didn't follow the time-travel pattern; it wasn't at all complex... nor even essential to the plot. It was just sort of thrown in for who knows what reason. So they could tack "Time Wars" onto the title?

This might be good for a chuckle on a rainy Saturday, Mystery-Science style with your friends. Or not. Again: there are far better films. I really don't know why I bother to keep watching Asylum films. Deer in the headlights or the ridiculously-optimistic belief that someday they just might make a good one. Seriously... that is just never going to happen.