'Inkheart' an emotionally challenged fantasy
Despite an impressive battery of high-quality special effects and a fun menagerie of fantastical creatures, "Inkheart" possesses much more ink (mostly on its characters' faces) than it does heart.
Here we have a tragic case of a potentially spellbinding film that sacrifices all its mystery and magic to serve a ker-thudding, functional narrative less interested in developing its characters than in sprinting from one plot point to the next.
In fact, Iain Softley's fantasy film wastes nary a second in dumbing itself down and eliminating any need for viewer curiosity. An introductory voice-over narrator tells us all about "silvertongues," people with the gift of bringing stories to life by merely reading them aloud.
Couldn't viewers - even children - have discovered this for themselves? Couldn't there have been a moment of mystery about why an American-accented bookbinder named Mortimer Folchart (Brendan Fraser) never reads stories to his British-accented, 12-year-old daughter Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett)?
Mortimer, or "Mo" for short, knows exactly what happens when he reads a storybook aloud. The characters and situations he orally describes physically enter our world, and a real person, apparently at random, gets sucked back into the book.
Years ago, back when he apparently didn't know he was a silvertongue, Mo read "Inkheart" to Meggie. Suddenly, the Captain Hook-like villain Capricorn (Gollum star Andy Serkis) and his ink-splotched henchmen popped into existence. Mo's wife Resa (Sienna Guillory) disappeared into the book's pages.
Mo dedicated himself to traveling the world in search of another rare copy of "Inkheart" so he might finally free his wife. (Apparently, Mo never thought to search on Amazon.com.)
This flimsy premise, based on Cornelia Funke's first novel from her popular trilogy, prompts questions such as "What? Mo never read Meggie fairy tales and wondered where those running gingerbread men came from?"
Meggie becomes suspicious about Dad's aversion to storytelling when she runs into a disheveled figure called Dustfinger (Paul Bettany), a fire-juggling fictional character attempting to get back into "Inkheart" to reunite with his wife (an utterly squandered Jennifer Connelly).
Capricorn and his thugs show up to make sure that Mo never gets another copy of "Inkheart," for fear he'll send them back into the book. They'd much rather hang out in our world, because it has telephones and guns.
Oscar winner Helen Mirren pops into the movie as Mo's Aunt Elinor, a cranky and caustic curmudgeon intended to function as the comic relief.
She's joined in the supporting ranks by character actor Jim Broadbent (as the befuddled and under-realized "Inkheart" author), and a stable of famous creatures gleaned from literature: the winged monkeys and Toto from "The Wizard of Oz," a unicorn, the ticking crocodile from "Peter Pan" and others.
None of these creations compares to the Shadow, the ultimate, CGI villain of "Inkheart." Imagine a vaporous version of the demon in the "Night on Bald Mountain" segment from "Fantasia." That's the Shadow, who arrives just in time for a rushed, ill-conceived climactic confrontation between the powers of write and wrong.
"Inkheart" marks the second flaccid fantasy in as many months to squander the delicious concept of storybooks that spring to life when read. (Adam Sandler's "Bedside Stories" was the first.)
Softley had a hefty budget, a talented cast and a novel concept, everything he needed to make this fantasy a classic.
He just didn't have an inkling of how to do it.
Two stars
"Inkheart"
@x BTO factbox text bold with rule:Starring: Brendan Fraser, Paul Bettany, Helen Mirren, Andy Serkis, Eliza Bennett
Directed by: Iain Softley
Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG. 106 minutes