This is a film I wouldn't normally touch with a barge pole but I have this fascination with Alex Pettyfer* and the terrible film choices he seems to be making. He's on my list of car crash cinema stars (with Robert Pattinson) mainly because I live in the hope that his intelligence will match his looks and he'll spot a decent project and learn to act properly.
But before I launch into a Kermodian tirade about how terrible Beastly is as a film (and it isn't great) I want to preface it by saying that I actually enjoyed it more than Red Riding Hood.
The curse makes him "as aggressively ugly on the outside as he is on the inside" so as well as a heavy slap of scarring he has tattoos and weird bits of metal all over his face. In order to lift the curse Kyle has a year to get someone to say they love him.
The main problem is that the morals are ladled on so thick that a room full of dictators couldn't fail to get the message. It reminded me of episodes of Barney the Dinosaur and no one likes to be reminded of Barney *shivers*. But in order to pack extra moral punch Kyle is made out to be such an appalling human being to start with the character is totally unbelievable.
My second big problem is the notion of 'ugly'. Taken at face value (excuse the pun) the 'ugly' people are played by the likes of Ms Olsen and Vanessa Hudgens - they must have fallen out of the branch-less side of the ugly tree is all I'm saying. But in this film the term is used as a catch all for people who are different from Kyle and his pretty, privileged chums ie a Goth or a scholarship student from a poor neighbourhood (Ms Hudgens who becomes the love interest) which is just horrible.
Brushing all that to one side in some sort of strange way I wanted Kyle to succeed and go back to being beautiful (aren't I the shallow one?). I bought into the relationship between him and Lindy (Hudgens) and I did laugh a few times (sometimes when I was supposed to). I did leave the cinema with a bit of a smile on my face which is more than I can say for Red Riding Hood which made me think 'oh is that it'. The key is not to think about it too much or it will make you cross.
But I'm not going to give it a higher score because it has so many flaws I'm sure a 14-year-old could have done a better job on the story. It gets 35% from me. The critics have been far less generous and on Rotten Tomatoes it has aggregated 17% from 81 reviews (ouch) but 61% of visitors to the site gave it the thumbs up.
Metacritic is more generous with 40% from 26 critics and an average user rating of 6.4/10. Must be a lot of Hudgens/Pettyfer fans going to see it.
* I wonder if he thought playing 'ugly' would do for him what it did for the likes of Charlize Theron in Monster and Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones? Lets applaud the beautiful people for looking like the rest of us and eating.
Comments