PLOT: Two teenage girls, devastated by the news that one is about to move away, discover a mermaid who's been washed ashore after a storm. The mermaid offers them one wish, in return for their help finding love with a hunky lifeguard.
Admittedly, as a fortysomething father of boys, I'm not an expert on what tween girls like, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say they will love the mermaid movie Aquamarine.
It's silly, mushy, full of "special moments," tween-girl in-jokes about love and crushes, and the mean girl gets humiliated like she's supposed to. Director Elizabeth Allen takes a fairly well-worn fluffy genre and infuses it with heart, if not originality or messy logic.
Credit Emma Roberts (yes, Julia's niece) and Joanna "JoJo" Levesque (the teeny-bop R&B girl-turned-actor) who really do seem like pre-teen best friends, with all the passionate hand-holding, sleepovers, squealing, boy-craziness and private codes that entails.
As Aquamarine begins we meet mousy Claire (Roberts) and tom-boyish Hailey (Levesque), best friends at Claire's family's beach resort, who are enjoying the summer under a cloud. Seems Hailey's mom, a marine biologist, is being transferred to Australia for research, and our best friends are soon to part. To take their minds off reality, they fantasize together about their crush-object -- hunky lifeguard Raymond (Jake McDorman), who unfortunately is monopolized by rhymes-with-witch Cecilia (Arielle Kebbel).
And then complications blow in, in the form of a tropical storm that dumps a surprisingly Valley-girl-ish mermaid named Aquamarine in Claire's pool. Seems Aqua (Sara Paxton) is on the run from an arranged marriage to a "mer-man" she doesn't love. Her sea-god dad is mad, hence the storm.
She has a bunch of powers -- to acquire legs in daylight, to speak any language all the way down to starfish, and most importantly, to grant a wish to anyone who does her a favour.
Hence the movie's plot. Aqua must prove to her father that love exists (long story), and settles on Raymond as the guy who must love her. The girls -- unhappy over the Raymond part, but keen for the chance to wish their split-up away -- take her up on it and proceed to give the gorgeous Aqua a tween-girl makeover.
And this was the part that elicited the highest-pitched laughs at the screening I was at. Advice like "phone him and then hang up" and "follow him around like you didn't even know he lived on this street" is actually pretty wry and hits the movie's target audience where it lives.
Soon, Aqua is cutting in on Cecilia's lifeguard, inspiring a teen-girl war. And Claire, Hailey and Aqua are on their way to discovering that best-friend love is better than boy-love.
That's a message that, with luck, will stick until maybe the second year of high school.
BOTTOM LINE: For its target audience -- girls between 9 and 12 -- this is actually a sweet film, with the usual tween cliches, about the superiority of friendship-type love over boy-love. With wry humour about tween-girl boy-craziness.
(This film is rated PG)
