ONCE upon a time there was a brilliant, uncompromising director called Terry Gilliam, whose visually arresting and wildly imaginative films were so often marred by muddled narratives.

The filmmaker's soaring flights of imagination reached creative highs, and box office and critical lows, with his 1988 epic The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen. Some in Hollywood turned their back on Gilliam, but he returned a few years later, suitably chastened, with two far more modest and successful pictures, The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys.

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While Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was perhaps one foray to the darker side of human nature too far, the spectre of creative excess rose again during filming of his long cherished project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The catalogue of catastrophes - natural and man-made - which followed became the stuff of legend, captured on camera in the documentary Lost In La Mancha.

Gilliam returns to the fantasy realm with The Brothers Grimm, a dark fantasy written by Ehren Kruger (Scream 3), set in a fairy-tale world of myth and folklore. Like much of his previous work, the new film is a ravishing feast for the senses but the plot gradually careens out of control, descending into mayhem by the end of the two hours.

It's a shame because the art direction and production design is staggering, recreating a Napoleonic countryside haunted by the legends of demons and monsters. Screenwriter Kruger has fun weaving in well-known fairy stories, from Jack And The Beanstalk (one of the young Grimm brothers sells the prized family cow for supposedly magic beans), Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel & Gretl.

Quirky and frequently amusing performances from leads Matt Damon and Heath Ledger also suggest much joviality behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, so much of the humour falls flat on the screen. The anti-heroes of this tall tale are scheming siblings Will (Damon) and Jake Grimm (Ledger), a pair of enterprising con men, who prey on the fears and superstitions of villagers, performing fake rituals and exorcisms to banish imaginary creatures.

French authorities eventually grow wise to the scam and it seems that Will and Jake may literally lose their heads to maniacal nobleman Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce), unless they can unravel the mystery of the young maidens, who have been vanishing in an enchanted forest on the German border.

Banter between Jake and Will provides fleeting comic relief, including a spot of rivalry for the affections of Lena Headey's feisty tracker, but the film hangs together by a thread.

Which snaps clean through for the hare-brained finale involving a werewolf, gargantuan catapult and a magical mirror. Who's the fairest of them all? Not The Brothers Grimm.

See it at UCI, Odeon