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In one of the recent trailers for the movie Inkheart, the narrator intoned how the hero speaks the words of a book and "opens the door to a magical world."
If only. I note that the trailer was eventually reworded. In fact, Inkheart does just the opposite. It brings the characters out of their magical worlds and into our not-so-magical one -- to detrimental effect.
Taken far too literally from the best-selling trilogy by Cornelia Funke, Inkheart is a passable, but prosaic and remarkably humourless kidflick that all but sucks the magic out of fairy tales by rendering the characters ordinary.
Rendering fairytale characters earthbound isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Disney's Enchanted proved. But that tale was told with considerable wit. Inkheart, for its part, boasts trumped-up urgency and chase scenes and second-rate FX.
When we meet young dad Mo Folchart (Brendan Fraser) and his daughter Meggie (Eliza Bennett), they are in a medieval-looking part of modern Europe, in the ninth year of looking for Meggie's lost mom (Sienna Guillory). Seems Mo is a "Silvertongue," who in the process of reading a book called Inkheart to his daughter at bedtime, brought some of the novel's unsavoury characters to this world -- and through some sort of cosmic tradeoff, sent mom to the bookworld.
This we discover when one of the book's refugees -- a "fire-eater" named Dustfinger (Paul Bettany) tracks him down to a) demand to be sent back, and b) warn him that the evil Capricorn (Andy Serkis) plans to stay and take over this plane of existence. All he needs is a good Silvertongue to bring an even bigger evil over.
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Thus, we find ourselves headed to Castle Cheesy Filmset, where Capricorn and his men are so enamoured with our world, they've traded their fairytale clothing and ways for cellphones, cars and leather jackets that make them look like members of a rogue Kosovo militia group. Their experiments with Silvertonguing, as it were, have lifted Rapunzel (Tereza Sverbova), one of Ali Baba's 40 thieves Farid (Rafi Gavron) and, in the most fleeting of cameos, the criminally underused flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. (C'mon, what's funnier than flying monkeys? How could you not make liberal use of them?)
Aided by not one but two slumming Oscar winners (Helen Mirren as Mo's dotty aunt and Jim Broadbent as the fictional author of Inkheart), they set about stopping Capricorn's plan to bring forth an all-powerful demon called The Shadow from the Inkheart world. This while we sit and wonder why Mo doesn't simply call up something similarly all-powerful, like the Genie in Arabian Nights.
It's been a busy couple of years for adaptations of best-selling children's books, what with Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, Narnia and Spiderwick, etc. The best you can say about Inkheart is that it's one of them, at least fast-paced enough to keep the kids diverted, if not spellbound. The worst you can say is it's the least magical of the lot.
(This film is rated PG)