BRAVE

title: BRAVE year: 2012 voices: Kelly Macdonald, Emma Thompson rating: *1/2

This is the epitome of burying the lead… But the trailer seemed a bit strange to begin with. Instead of the usual montage summing up the entire movie, or at least half of it, we get one scene: an assertive tomboy princess with neat looking fiery red hair shoots an arrow to choose her own fate instead of a bunch of losers vying to marry her: the one that hits the bulls eye wins her hand in marriage. (Let’s make it clear, all three young men are pathetic wrecks: if one resembled an Elfin Johnny Depp with half a brain, perhaps there’d be no story at all.)

After our frustrated heroine, Princess Merida, hits all the marks by herself, the real tale begins – and not only is it strange, awkward and confusing, but even the target-audience children might shake their heads in disbelief. Merida, in order to change her destiny, seeks a forest witch who gives her a spell. Then, back at the castle, Merida offers her mom – the person really in charge of this arranged marriage thing – a spiked muffin that quickly changes her into a… giant bear! This was unplanned; Merida wanted to change her mother, not change her mother.

The rest of the movie has the Princess keeping Mother Bear away from her huntsman father who, years earlier and as the film began, lost his leg battling a… you got it… bear. And then her three troublesome little brothers turn into bears and there’s the one big bad bear from the intro that’s part of a confusing backstory about a fallen prince.

So with all the potential of setting a movie in the time where trolls and gnomes and dragons and fairies and kings and queens and knights could have roamed the mystical Celtic countryside, we get a bunch of common bears and a stretched-out story lacking a real plot, leaving only a memory of the "trailer" that would have made a fantastic short film to open a real movie with.