Bombastic, whimsical, and delicious,THE BROTHERS GRIMM evokes all of the adjectives one comes to expect about the work of director Terry Gilliam. Like Twelve Monkeys, it's weird. Like Time Bandits, it's fanciful and just a bit dark. Like Brazil, it's more than a bit offbeat; and like all of his work with Monty Python, it is most certainly original.

But this latest film of Gilliam's also bears the imprimatur of its Hollywood-bred screenwriter, Ehren Kruger, the horror wild child behind Scream 3 and The Ring. An odd-duck pairing, their collaboration tempers Gilliam's imaginative tangents with Kruger's mainstream sensibilities, meshing together idiosyncratic elements with an almost fiendish devotion to narrative. Entertaining and clever and only rarely off-putting, this hybrid is fantastical but familiar, definitely weird but not uncomfortable...a Harry Potter experience for those who have outgrown the fantasy cliches of boy wizards. THE BROTHERS GRIMM -- which is only tangentially about the authors of the famous Anglo-Saxon fairy tales -- is really a comic ghost story wrapped in the postmodern folds of Shakespeare In Love, where the characters could be our contemporaries if it weren't for the period dress and bad hairstyles.

In Gilliam and Kruger's world, the Grimm brothers Wilhelm (Matt Damon) and Jacob (Heath Ledger) are theatrical hucksters who drum up fake witches in rural German villages, and then exorcise those demons...for a fee. Their lives are filled with wine, women and stories; Jacob, in particular, is consumed with the folk tales of his childhood. Wilhelm, however, fancies himself a realist...that is, until the two encounter the forest of Marbaden, where little girls in red riding hoods and those dropping bread crumbs are disappearing in droves.

The central mystery rapidly becomes the focus of the Grimms' adventure, including a tug of war over a village tomboy, Angelika (Lena Headey) and a vain, aging sorceress (Monica Belucci). There's little in the way of subtlety, in either the drama or the comedy. At moments, the film careens over the edge of believability in a cartoony, broadly drawn style. Especially in the first half-hour, The Brothers Grimm struggles to find its footing, bungling comic moments and wasting opportunities to fill out its central characters.

But as the film continues, Ledger finds an amiable rhythm in Jacob's literary nebbishness, and soon after Damon balances his hammy portrayal with more textured colorings. Like the Grimm tales themselves, the film is alternatively frightening and barbaric, and probably a tough fit for Miramax, who can't really sell it to children. The onscreen violence lands somewhere just shy of Lord of the Rings, but the storytellers treat the violence with less deference than the hobbits did. The Brothers Grimm is probably best for adults who still have a kid inside them somewhere, people with a worldly understanding of the modern-day equivalents of witches and werewolves. Imperfect but eminently enjoyable.

-- Gabriel Shanks