Enchanted

My cynical side wasn't impressed by Enchanted.

I began to wonder: "Is this merely Hollywood's latest idea of the perfect 'Chick Flick'?" The central character is a fairy-tale princess who comes to life and spends the whole movie searching for her Prince Charming while prattling on and on about the power of True Love's kiss. Sounds less like a wonderful story, to me, and more like some product that is easy to market to the gentle sex.

It's got some nice songs and good special effects but, except for James Marsden (giving yet another superb performance in a thankless role), I wasn't at all impressed by the cast. Amy Adams is a bit ordinary to be a fairy-tale princess, and Patrick Dempsey is incredibly dull as the real-world guy who joins her in her quest. As her magic changed the world around them, and random strangers broke into song and so forth, Dempsey seemed oddly wooden and out-of-place in the middle of it all. Not out-of-place in a humourously-bewildered-by-it-all kind of way, he just seemed dreadfully dull and boring.

But there are other flaws, too: It's also a schizophrenic movie. The first quarter is an animated sequence, the middle half is standard-fare rom-com and the final quarter is a lavish FX-laden action finale. Huh?! Leaving the theatre I felt like I had seen three movies. Three very ordinary movies.

I'm giving this a "B".