Beastly

Director: Daniel Barnz
Writers: Daniel Barnz, Alex Flinn (author)
Starring: Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Hudgens
Release Date: March 4, 2011
Length: 1 hour 26 minutes

Director Daniel Barnz takes on the adaptation of Alex Flinn’s young adult novel, Beastly…that is a modernized version of Beauty and The Beast…with teenagers…and Vanessa Hudgens. You can’t help but be intrigued by this invigorating idea of a film. In true Beauty and The Beast fashion, a girl sacrifices herself to an unknown beast in order to save her ill father and the Beauty and the Beast end up happily in love in the end when he turns into a handsome prince. In Beastly, high school superstar Kyle Kingston (Alex Pettyfer) is cursed by a young witch (Mary-Kate Olsen) and turned into what looks like a bald guy with a bunch of tattoos. His father, after seeing every plastic surgeon in the country, decides to basically hide him away from the rest of the world in a huge house in Brooklyn with his wise Jamaican maid Zola, while slowly losing touch with Kyle. After being isolated for too long, Kyle makes a deal with the father of a girl he likes. Kyle catches the father in the middle of a dangerous crime and uses this offer to save him. The deal is that the daughter, Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens) lives with Kyle in his mansion in Brooklyn. Although Lindy is unappeased that she’s been kidnapped in the 21^st century, she eventually becomes friendly and romantically attracted to Kyle. What is so annoyingly unique about this adaptation of the classic tale is that it revolves around the unoriginal theme of looks and superficiality in high school. The overdone message that looks aren’t important is kind of shoved in your face by the story and dialogue throughout the movie. However this does not come across when the unattractive loser is the gorgeous Vanessa Hudgens and the Beast is still very attractive and fit, wearing muscle shirts in half the scenes and nothing in the others. It’s an interesting concept to have a modernized version of the gothic tale and that is probably why the novel worked a lot better than the film. The novel, not being anything extraordinary, was still interesting and enjoyable. You can tell that the film adaptation, of the novelized adaptation of the original story just added cheesy movie romance moments to the plain script. This greatly enforced the shallowness theme down our throats until it was just ridiculously unrealistic that characters would be that mean and petty. The script lost the value of it’s original plot with unoriginal, laughable dialogue spoken by what seemed like a whole cast of terrible actors. Rising British star Alex Pettyfer is no doubt very attractive and has proven to be a decent actor in previous work. However, in no way does he represent his talent with his role he is given in this film. That might be because every character was written so stereotypically without any real deepness or mystery. Actress Vanessa Hudgens has never proven herself to be a staggering performer and is not breaking her streak anytime soon. Her fake voice when she is upset drives the audience’s brains right up the wall while she makes the same old put-on faces she used in High School Musical. The most embarrassing acting job in the film came from Mary-Kate Olsen, who no one’s seen in ages on screen. So how the hell did she end up in this movie? Her lines were the most cringe bearing out of the whole film. I could only laugh when the forgotten actress popped up on screen for her presence and dialogue. The only rewarding performance of the film came from How I Met Your Mother’s Neil Patrick Harris. Even his role was a bit forced, as the blind tutor for the monster of a kid kept away by his mean father. He broke through parts of the overdramatic curtain that caused gagging, with his witty personality and actual good acting background. This movie is somewhat sweet in parts, but is mostly predictable, unintentionally funny, and completely improbable. Suffice to say, no one will miss out on avoiding seeing Beastly.