Starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger. Rated PG. For showtimes, please see page 68

Even at his best, Terry Gilliam always goes too far. His most successful efforts (Brazil) are overloaded with brilliant ideas battling it out with things that don't quite work but really should. At his worst, Gilliam's ideas implode under their own weight, largely thanks to his propensity for winging things that normally take a lot of careful planning.

The Brothers Grimm is nowhere near as bad as Gilliam's worst, but it's so far from good that you have to wonder how it got made the way it did. On paper, mixing the wacky animator and lover of fabulist arcana (as in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) with the chief anthologists of Central European folktales seems a natural. But just about everything sits wrong here, from the needlessly murky art direction to the sludgy music and lack of interesting side characters. And no one expected Gilliam to stick to any but the most basic facts about Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, those obsessive collectors from 19th-century Germany, but why on earth would he turn the elder sibling, Jacob, into the younger?

Anyway, one has time to contemplate such nonsense because little effort is spent on things that seem sensible.

The film's assertion, which might generously be called a plot, has the Grimms as itinerant scam artists, picking up loose change and loose women while exploiting peasants who hire them as ghostbusters. While waging one of their local exorcisms, complete with trip wires and other high-tech gadgets, they are nabbed by members of Napoleon's occupying army.

After suitably garish torture at the hands of a hired Italian (Peter Stormare), the bickering duo is ordered to perform a real dewitchment. Or to play Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in a revival of The Road to movies; I can't remember which.

I'm happy to report that the script, from The Skeleton Key's Ehren Kruger, is not as laden with anachronistic dialogue as the film's soggy trailers suggest (wherein characters are told to "get it together" and the like). But it is also lacking anything resembling magic, the one ingredient indispensable to any run at updating or repositioning such primal fare as Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, or any other familiar fairy tales, each of which seems to float by as quickly as a cameo by a child star from an ancient sitcom.

One thing that does come across in this Czech-shot venture is the enduring fear of the forest and any kind of untamed nature, especially the female kind. That is embodied on the one hand by a lethally seductive 300-year-old queen played by Monica Bellucci and on the other by England's Lena Headey as a leather-clad woman of action-this decade's de rigueur stab at cinematic feminism.

But nobody seems to care much about these or any other issues limply raised. Just about the only moment of passion or depth comes when Will steps back to marvel at the way the local woods shift about crazily in the night.

"They're better funded than we are," he says, with a timeless twinge of envy.