Oscar season is just around the corner, and the inevitable box office lull is upon us. It’s Movie Biz 101: the critically acclaimed movies come out in the fall, just before the awards season starts up, and the blockbusters come out in the summer. As a result, the months in between the Oscar bait and the summer hits are home to some of the most unimpressive movies you will see all year. And this year is no exception.

Here’s the thing about “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.” I don’t really know what it was trying to do. After a quick opening scene starring young Hansel and Gretel, a witch that looked like Jigsaw’s crusty old aunt and a preposterous-looking candy house, the opening credits rolled. As soon as I saw Will Ferrell listed as a producer, I assumed the movie would be a comedy. To tell you the truth, I’m still not really sure if I was right.

A scene would start out with a fairly intense witch chase, and you’d be fooled into thinking they were going to get serious for a moment. But then the witch would get down on all fours and gallop across a fallen tree, and you’d laugh in spite of yourself because … _what_? If the movie had committed to either being a supernatural action flick or a supernatural screwball comedy, it could have at least achieved a sense of direction. But it hovered frustratingly between the two, and even though I had to stifle my laughter a few times, I was only laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

The movie follows the grown-up Hansel and Gretel (Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton) on their quest to capture and kill a witch (Famke Janssen) who has been terrorizing villages and kidnapping children. The characters are about as one-dimensional as they could possibly be, so congrats to you if you can manage to form any kind of connection to them because I certainly wasn’t able to manage that.

The movie wasted little time on plot, dialogue and character development, preferring to focus on overdramatic gory, like people getting their heads stomped into jelly by a troll named Edward.

(Side note: Edward wins the Viewing Room award for “Most Complex Character,” an award I made up as I was writing this. Hey, at least he’s visibly conflicted about the whole mess. It doesn’t seem like anyone else tied to the movie is, including the director.)

The story goes in circles because there’s just not much to it besides the titular witch-hunting. I will admit the music was surprisingly good, but it was produced by world-renowned composer Hans Zimmer, which only furthers my belief that this movie is some kind of elaborate joke that no one is privy to, like when Joaquin Phoenix had his mental breakdown.

Although much time is spent trying to convince you that you’re watching a serious fairy tale action movie (whoa, that’s not a real genre) I couldn’t help but feel that the screenwriter was sneaking absurd little details into the script just to see if anyone would notice. I can think of no other way to explain the 15 minutes of screen time in which Gretel gets absurdly brutal “Fight Club” levels of whoop-ass tossed her way by four very large and very angry villagers while Hansel and his pretty female companion slack off in the magical forest. This exact scenario occurs on two separate occasions and for some reason no one else in the theater was laughing about it with me.

Yet the best joke in the whole movie might be that, as a result of eating too much sugar that one time he was trapped inside the evil house of sweets, Hansel gets diabetes. Granted, I may not know a lot about medicine, but come on. That is most assuredly not how you develop diabetes.

I may have managed to get a few laughs out of this movie, but in the end it was just a waste of its dynamic lead actors and an interesting premise. But if you have a few dollars to burn or have an affinity for watching Gemma Arterton get repeatedly punched in the face (hopefully the former), you might enjoy this movie. Maybe.