Tooth Fairy is a family comedy featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in a tutu, not to mention Julie Andrews and Billy Crystal sporting full fairy wings — and you will believe in magic when it’s done. Or at least in good casting.
Johnson stars as Derek, a minor-league hockey player who has seen his own dreams of the NHL vanish. He compensates by making a name for himself as a thug on the ice, and his specialty is hitting other players and knocking out their teeth. He’s called the tooth fairy. Nudge, nudge.
Derek thinks it’s good for children to be told hard truths. He doesn’t want to inspire kids to dream, because they’ll just be disappointed. He dashes the hopes of a little hockey fan, for example. His girlfriend (Ashley Judd) is a single mom, and one day Derek comes close to telling her little daughter that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist.
Poof! That betrayal of the imagination means that Derek has to learn a lesson.
He is magically transported into the world of fairies — a prettier, more pastel place with considerably better writing. Andrews is the stern fairy godmother who explains to Derek, as he stands around in that tutu with his new wings, that he has erred by stealing a child’s dream. His punishment will be two weeks work as a real tooth fairy.
Crystal is the wiseacre fairy (married to a leprechaun, oy) who outfits our hero with the shrinking paste, invisibility spray and other magic items that will permit him to enter people’s houses and take away their child’s lost tooth. Why does that sound so perverse? Anyway, google-eyed British comic Stephen Merchant (The Office) is the fairy bureaucrat who guides Derek in the ways of fairydom.
Derek is flinty and resistant in the beginning, hating his tooth fairy duties and making all the available mistakes. (He comes up against a house cat while in his tiny, magical, tooth fairy state; he uses too much amnesia dust; he forgets he failed flying, etc.) but before his time is up on the job he has learned the importance of the imagination and of dreaming big.
There are other things going on in Tooth Fairy, such as Derek’s own hockey ambitions, his rivalry with an aggressive younger hockey player (skateboarder Ryan Sheckler) and the musical hopes of a fatherless adolescent (Chase Ellison). All those various little subplots are tied together in a big moral bow that is the saccharine last 15 minutes of the movie, but never mind. Dwayne Johnson is endlessly good-natured and smart enough to surround himself with very funny people.
Tooth Fairy has more than enough pratfalls and silly one-liners to amuse kids and their accompanying grown-ups.
