Just got back from watching it. I have to agree with Harry here, although I probably liked it less than he did. The movie's actually quite slack up until the point at which flashback meets the movie's present time. Then I felt the "magic", as there were actually stakes, and there was the whole "everybody's rooting for the hero!" thing going, so you feel the same sort of excitement you feel when watching a sports film when the final plays / innings / what have you are about to begin.
Other than that, the love story at the heart of the film felt really, really undercooked. I suppose the problem for me was the imposition of thinly sketched fairy tale characters over a setting of real squalor and poverty. When a child in the movie jumps into a pool of shit, it's played for yuks, but I was bothered by the fact that if a kid were actually to do that they would likely contract many, probably fatal, diseases. Many people have actually died that way. But the kid gets soaped up and is healthy and beautiful well into the future. When a child is blinded so that he will pull in more begging money for his handlers, it's not a real character experiencing that, it's a child being eaten by the big bad witches in the gingerbread house, it's kids being turned into donkeys, it's a real horror but it isn't real, because nothing else in the film is. The real pull of the film for me was the actual game show / interrogation plotline. Everything else was filler.
