When Hollywood tackles epic tales, the result isn’t always epic.
Heaven knows Camelot has suffered many a blow. “The Last Legion” and “King Arthur” stand witness. Homer, too, had intellectual property stolen for the worse in “Troy” and “Helen of Troy.”

p. Little wonder, then, that enthusiasts of the Old English epic poem “Beowulf” viewed the preview for Robert Zemeckis’s film adaptation with a mixture of anticipation and wariness.

p. Open-minded “Beowulf” fans, however, will find in this movie a poignant, cleverly written reinterpretation of a timeless tale. Not your mother’s “Beowulf,” Zemeckis presents a fresh portrait of the story that emphasizes the fallibility of the hero.

p. Our generation — having forgone Superman for antiheroes like the Punisher, Danny Ocean’s 11 thieves and others — has cultivated an increasing distrust of heroes. For better or worse, the superhuman warrior Beowulf (Ray Winstone, “The Departed”), a justified braggart in the old tale, would not translate successfully into a modern film.

p. So, clearly we can’t stomach the glory ethos necessary to tell this story straight. If we can’t tell the story of a hero battling actual demons, we can at least show him battling his own.

p. When it comes to the Beowulf legend, deconstruction is the name of the game. Neil Gaiman, author of the award-winning “Sandman” graphic novels, and Canadian screenwriter Roger Avary wrote the movie’s highly imaginative and resourceful screenplay. Surprisingly, they preserve the tale’s plot-points very faithfully. No component is left out — only reinvented.

p. The writers actually pay attention to the minor poetic details that Hollywood usually tramples. All characters are present and mirror their literary counterparts enough to lend them credibility.

p. Even King Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins, “Silence of the Lambs”) allusion to his own dragon-slaying days remains, as does the part in which Unferth (John Malkovich, “Being John Malkovich”) calls Beowulf out for losing in a swimming contest. The pagan-Christian tension, also a part of the poem’s tradition, is deftly woven in as well.

p. Make no mistake — while he would have recognized his creation, the poet would have exclaimed (as he sat in the theater munching early Anglo-Saxon popcorn), “That is not what I meant.”
Gaiman and Avary offer a distorted reflection of the story because the components, though present, have all been tweaked just enough to change the meaning of the entire story.

p. Rather than presenting us with a hero who fights the hopeless fight — all the more glorious, as J.R.R. Tolkien said, because it is futile — we get a hero who succumbs to pride, lies and lust in the most human of ways. As is so often the case with modern deconstructions of tales, the monsters become sympathetic agents of their own destiny and the heroes look like monsters beside them.

p. Possibly the most stunning portion of “Beowulf” is the portrayal of Grendel (Crispin Glover, “Charlie’s Angels”). A parody of man, his cries are human and anguished. This sticks to the ancient story, which describes Grendel as a large humanoid descended from Cain. Damned without a say, poor Grendel represents the consequences of man’s sin.

p. This leads into the biggest departure from the poem: Mother Grendel as a sexy-mama-monster-maker. Those who hated this film hated it mostly because of this angle, ascribing the presence of Angelina Jolie (“Mr. and Mrs. Smith”) to Hollywood’s impulse to sex-up even the most solemn of stories (see “Titanic” and “Pearl Harbor”). However, she comes bearing allegory in addition to eye-candy.

p. Gaiman and Avary set Mother Grendel as the centerpiece — for generations, she has seduced Denmark’s kings and their moral failings beget a monster who returns to plague his father’s kingdom. This proves an interesting and poetic twist, reminiscent of David’s Absalom — the third son of King David who, after fleeing his home, returned leading a rebellion. “The sins of the father” becomes the movie’s mantra. If Hrothgar seems distracted, it’s because Grendel is a beast of his loins. The dragon, in turn, is that of Beowulf’s — the result of Beowulf’s seduction by Mother Grendel.

p. The film succeeds not only through deft manipulation of old material, but in its overall artistry. Once you become accustomed enough to the CGI to realize that this is not a “Shrek” movie, you are transported entirely. The eeriness of Grendel, especially when he and his mother speak pseudo-Old English back and forth, proves very evocative. The feast songs, the individual characters, the gloomy atmosphere and general attention to detail are excellent.

p. Even Beowulf’s unrefined Cockney accent makes sense; he’s a man who lives by muscle and sword and doesn’t learn true heroism until the end.

p. The movie’s theme song, “A Hero Comes Home,” summarizes the movie’s two layers nicely. A hero comes home from the fray, yes. But only once he has undergone life’s trials and learned what matters, can he truly come home to himself.

“No Country for Old Men,” the latest offering from cinematic wonder-twins Ethan and Joel Coen (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”), seems to have been the victim of some tricky advertising.

p. Trailers would have you believe the film revolves around a “Die Hard”-style everyman turned superman, engaged in a clever cat-and-mouse game with a Tarantino-esque mega-assassin, rife with fist fights, car explosions and shotgun blasts aplenty.
The actual film is a surprisingly different animal.

p. For one thing, the movie is far more subdued, in an eerie sort of way. The whole film is mostly devoid of bright colors, completely devoid of background music and very conservative with human emotions.

p. The characters also aren’t the typical action heroes you’d expect from the previews. Rather, they’re just regular Joes, and the fact that one of them happens to be an insidious serial killer doesn’t change that. He hurts and runs and bleeds just like everybody else, and he certainly does a lot of that last one as he chases a missing $2 million sum from a soured drug deal across the barren plains of the Mojave Desert.

p. Javier Bardem (“Collateral”), in playing serial killer Anton Chigurh, knows how to be a cold, unfeeling badass, and the Coen Brothers, no strangers to the serial killer concept, gave him plenty of room. But unlike your garden-variety cold, unfeeling badass, Chigurh has been deposited in a landscape where everybody else seems to share his bleak outlook on life. Maybe it’s the barren, inhospitable desert backdrop, but everyone in this movie is just trying to get by. Nothing more, nothing less.

p. By the same token, it’s difficult to feel bad for Llewelyn Moss, the finder of the lost cash that Chigurh is after with such vigor. Moss, played with deft gruffness by Josh Brolin (“Grindhouse”), stumbles upon the money after coming across a half-dozen brutally slaughtered men.

p. Perhaps that’s why it’s hard to feel anything for these characters. With the exception of Kelly Macdonald (“Gosford Park”) as Moss’s warm-hearted wife, they’re all leathery faces with leathery personalities — killing, stalking and running without a second thought.

p. The kicker is that it’s not for grand ideals, chivalry or Queen and Country, but for money. Even the guys in “The Italian Job” had the revenge thing going for them. But here, it’s just money, plain and simple. Money in a nondescript black suitcase. Money that only makes anyone and everyone who comes across it thoroughly miserable.

p. Tommy Lee Jones (“Men In Black”) as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell says at the movie’s outset that crime endangers not only the body, but the soul. If that’s true, then that is why this movie feels like such a numbing agent. We’ve seen so much crime, death and violence that one more bloody shoot-up on the big screen just rolls off our collective back like water off the proverbial duck.

p. This movie acts as case-in-point. It elicited more cries of protest from the audience when a dog was shot than from all of the human deaths combined. The violence in “No Country for Old Men” isn’t the glitzy James Bond kind, it’s the cold, inexplicable kind, and that’s why it’s so haunting.

A Disney animated film has once again reigned over the box office for the Thanksgiving holiday.

p. The surprising thing is that this time it wasn’t a flashy CGI Pixar spectacle, but rather a heartfelt tale that is much closer to the traditional hand-drawn animated fare of yore.

p. “Enchanted” begins in the animated kingdom of Andalasia, where we meet Giselle (Amy Adams, “Catch Me if You Can”), the newest addition to Disney’s lineup of princesses. In the course of one delightfully sappy musical number entitled “True Love’s Kiss,” Giselle meets handsome Prince Edward (James Marsden, “Hairspray”), declares that he is her one true love and immediately agrees that they should be married.

p. Unfortunately, Edward’s evil stepmother, Queen Narissa, (Susan Sarandon, “Thelma & Louise”), is infuriated by the thought of losing her crown to young Giselle, so she dons the form of a Snow White-esque old hag and pushes the fair maiden down an enchanted well. Through a mystical transformation, Giselle goes from being an animated princess to a real-life fair maiden, and she finds herself lost and confused in the very real world of New York City.

p. As soon as she hits the Big Apple, you realize that Giselle is not your average damsel-in-distress, nor is her new real-world suitor your average Prince Charming. She meets divorce lawyer Robert, played by Patrick Dempsey (“Grey’s Anatomy”), who welcomes the confused young woman into his home. Despite their eventual attraction, Robert is not exactly free to sweep Giselle off her feet. He has a pint-sized little princess of his own — his daughter Morgan (newcomer Rachel Covey) — as well as longtime girlfriend Nancy, played by Broadway favorite Idina Menzel (“Rent”), who’s ready for Robert to commit.

p. The relationships in his life are as messy as his cluttered apartment, which Giselle tidies up in a number called the “Happy Working Song” with the help of New York’s finest: a bevy of rats, pigeons and roaches.

p. While Giselle is learning the ways of the city, Prince Edward journeys to New York in search of his betrothed. He is accompanied by Queen Narissa’s malicious henchman Nathaniel (Timothy Spall, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”), who is determined to get rid of Giselle, as well as a scene-stealing chipmunk named Pip.

p. As Edward and his gang experience mishaps around Manhattan, Giselle is finding herself more and more attracted to Robert. Soon she realizes she must make a choice between the handsome Edward and a different kind of Prince Charming who leads a much more exciting, yet complicated life.

p. Fans of classic Disney films will delight in catching the hidden nods to past favorites, from Giselle channeling Snow White with her animal-summoning yodel, to the inclusion of an Italian restaurant called “Bella Notte,” reminiscent of the beloved spaghetti-eating scene in “Lady and the Tramp.”

p. Also present are the catchy tunes that some of Disney’s more recent films have been missing. Practical Robert may chide Giselle for randomly bursting into song, but we audience members are still delighted by the infectious tunes of Alan Menken who scored “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast.”

p. The type of show-stopping song and dance number that Disney is known for comes midway through the film with “That’s How She Knows,” but this time it is a live-action spectacle in which Jamaican street performers, sanitation workers and Central Park pedestrians accompany the fair Giselle, rather than friendly animated woodland creatures.

p. If the movie has one flaw, it might be the lengthy climax in which the villainous Narissa finally enters the “real world.” This scene falls into the typical Disney drawn-out-final-battle pattern, and is the only part of the film that borders on tired within an otherwise innovative film. This brief bit of unoriginality is easily forgivable because of the delightful end sequence that follows.

p. Of course every Disney film has to have a moral, and the message in “Enchanted” is a refreshing one, indeed. The film never tries to assert that things are always peachy. It acknowledges that real world problems certainly exist. Yet, through Giselle’s eternally sunny disposition, we become convinced that, with a little perseverance, dreams can still come true.

p. The unique thing about “Enchanted” is that it manages to remain a very earnest, touching story, even while subtly poking fun at the type of dreams-come-true fairy tale it is attempting to emulate. It takes what the classic animated Disney features used to do best, and adds a hint of “Shrek”-esque cynicism to make it more consumable for modern audiences, who realize that life doesn’t always end happily ever after.