Director Terry Gilliam should be sentenced to one year of creating short animation sketches for the BBC. Perhaps if he were confined by the limits he once enjoyed as Monty Python's hallucinogenic Disney, he might be able to reclaim his artistic powers. For Gilliam, unlimited space and resources only seems to create bloated skits tricked-up as epics.

Gilliam's films of late have been hollow though lavish experiences where we're forced to swallow, gavage-style, a glut of images that add up to little. His latest, The Brothers Grimm, is an extremely disappointing example of this trend, especially as the subject matter (the famed brothers and their tales) seems so promising. Yet Gilliam gives in to the most ordinary of Hollywood impulses, delivering a forced frolic for two stars, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, with the usual grog-shop rough-housing and straddling-house whoring that one expects from an Old World romp.

The shreds-and-patches plot re-imagines the Grimm Brothers as a couple of 19th-century hucksters who pull into villages to exorcise witches and goblins of their own creation. While these two mercenary ghost-busters work the countryside, the more studious of the two (you can tell by his glasses), Jakob, played by Ledger, keeps a common book of dark folktales that he's heard along the way. Before too long, the pair and their colleagues find themselves enmeshed in a real cautionary tale of Gothic horror that happily appropriates scraps of Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, et al. It naturally falls to the brothers to sort out the mystery, and Jakob's little book of tales, which has long been disparaged by everyone, suddenly finds service as a grimoire (if you will) to defeat the evil spell that has been cast over a little town.

Free to go about their routine lives of mucking about in the earth unmolested by the supernatural, the happy peasants break into a spontaneously choreographed kolo in thanksgiving for their deliverance by the brothers. It was then that the Czech-by-way-of-Latin term "nomen omen" came to mind: This is Grimm by name and grim by nature.

Gilliam's imagery is rich and his lighting is hauntingly spectral at times. The location shots (Brothers Grimm was primarily filmed here in the Czech Republic) are also spectacular, but it is all in the service of a thin, intellectually insulting script. Gilliam is only interested in the manipulation of images rather than the articulation of ideas, unlike some better films that have managed to engender new enthusiasm and interpretations for folklore, such as Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves and the truly Grimm-based Snow White: A Tale of Terror.

Instead we're given aggressive whimsy and the flagon dregs of wit. The performances are all overwrought, as if to draw our attention away from the fact that the cast has been given nothing to chew on. The genius of Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm is effortlessly humbled in the hands of the two leading men, especially Ledger, who twitches more than even Brad Pitt managed to achieve in Gilliam's over-praised Twelve Monkeys (a needless elaboration on Chris Marker's La Jetée). The cartoon continues with the usually excellent Jonathan Pryce finding his accent for a French official somewhere along the border between Pepe Le Moko and Pepe Le Pew, while Peter Stormare's Cavaldi should be examined by the Italian Defamation League (Chico Marx was subtle by comparison). It's safe to say that Gilliam is not an actors' director.