Hola all. Massawyrm here.
In the rush to duplicate the success of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies, the studios snapped up anything and everything fantasy with any following at all and have spent the last few years trying to make them work. Some have worked with mixed success (the Narnia films, The Spiderwick Chronicles) others have been miserable failures (Eragon, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising.) But there have been few, if any that were solid, well intentioned misfires. Until now. Filling the vacancy in the studio success rate is Inkheart, a film with a solid concept, a wonderful cast and good story…that just fails to ever connect properly with the audience.
Inkheart is not a bad film. In fact, it is one I quite would like to enjoy. But the whole thing feels hollow – like it is the Tin Man of movies. Everything is in the right place and functioning as it should. There’s just one thing missing. But despite how interesting the concept is, despite how well done much of the design work is, despite how much heart was put INTO this, there’s very little heart that comes OUT of it. No matter how hard you try, it is almost impossible to care about these characters. They try really hard to get you to care, and you just can’t.
The basic concept is simple: there are people in this world born with the gift to read passages aloud and summon the characters and items right off of the page. Trouble is, when you do it, it sends someone or something back into the book you were reading. Now, this element is never properly explained and seems to only be used when it is appropriate to the story (and not, you know, during the climax.) But when our hero (Brendan Fraser) reads to his wife and daughter, one of the characters comes out and his wife pops in. Fast Forward 12 years and Fraser and his daughter (Eliza Bennett who looks disturbingly like a prepubescent Laura Dern) travel the globe looking for another copy of the out of print book his wife is trapped in while being chased by an evil character from the book who wants to use his power to summon riches and powerful creatures.
Trouble is Fraser, in spite of being the lead, is the least interesting character in the movie. Despite such a cool power, he’s given even less of a character than can be found in most of his other characters. And the entire crux of the film hinges upon his relationship with his daughter, which is just kind of there. I like Fraser a lot – he’s found his niche and is becoming the Doug McClure of this younger generation. He’s the plucky, strong jawed hero with a good humor about him and this likable gosh-darn quality. And if this was the 60’s, he’d be rolling around on the ground with rubber monsters rather than running from CG menaces. We’ve seen greatness out of him (Gods and Monsters) but he’s the kind of guy that can’t bring anything extra to a role. If the soul of the character doesn’t exist on the page, Fraser won’t invent one to fill the gap. And this character is a paint by numbers dad that desperately needed someone to bring something different to the role.
Everyone else is at least interesting. Bennet is adorable as the plucky daughter and brings a lot to her (mostly underwritten) character. Paul Bettany BRINGS IT, as he is oft to do, and really makes a lot out of the role of Dustfinger – a wily, selfish fire summoner pulled out of the book Inkheart. There’s even a cool moment in which real-life wife Jennifer Connolly shows up in flashback as…his wife. Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent both seem to be having the time of their lives playing over the top caricatures and Andy Serkis is great as the slimy villain. But as hard as everyone seems to be trying to bring this to life, it just always fails to connect. Even though it’s very lean and doesn’t have a moment of fat to it, it just gets boring as you just find it hard to care about what’s going on.
And all of that is before you even begin to think about how fast and loose they play with their own laws, rules and setups throughout the film. They’ve essentially created omnipotent characters (the movie introduces three that exist at the same time) but assume that despite these beings existing for thousands of years, that no one has ever thought of the things they do in the climax. And once you begin wondering about that, the entire concept of the film collapses in upon itself.
But like I said, it’s not a terrible film. If you’ve got kids, they might enjoy it. It’s fairly fast paced and has a smattering of cute moments – and some REALLY COOL special effects at times. There’s some Wizard of Oz flying monkeys in here that would tickle Harry’s brain into thinking about that updated version of the film he’d like to see that he wrote about in his book. But ultimately it is a mostly forgettable affair that will leave you shrugging at the end. It’s cute, but will most likely suffer the fate of many of its other fantasy contemporaries, never to see the rest of its series brought to the screen.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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