Well, it’s no Harry Potter.
Over the past couple of years, filmmaker after filmmaker has tried to take the enchantment from childrens’ fantasy literature and throw it onto the silver screen. We’ve seen this in films from Harry Potter and Narnia to Golden Compass and Spiderwick Chronicles. Blessed with epic music, beautiful cinematography, and hoards of special effects, the PG audience loves seeing their bedtime stories come to life in front of them.
Inkheart takes this premise a step further, bringing forth the idea of what the world would be like if we really could make our bedtime stories come to life. Brendan Fraser plays Mortimer, a father and book binder who has the ability to bring characters and objects out of books by reading them out loud- the only price being that for everyone who comes out of a book, someone else must go back in.
The film is lovely to watch. Cinematographer Roger Pratt, whose work was previously seen in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, maximizes the beauty of the European landscape, forming a brightly colorful backdrop of greens, grays, and reds that almost make the film worth seeing on its own. The treasure trove of well-known actor slumming their way through this film (pass on Brendan Fraser, and you’ve still got Helen Mirren, Paul Bettany, Jim Broadbent, Andy Serkis, and, in an entirely pointless cameo, Jennifer Connelly) give some life to a less than ideal screenplay. And when the special effects do come into play, they give the film the aura of magic required of this sort of film.
That said, there is so much wrong with this film that, beautiful or not, it cannot really stand on its own among the other fantasy classics and modern classics in either literature or film. There are many good guys and characters that, as fun as they appear to be, really are useless to the plot. Helen Mirren rides into Andy Serkis’s evil lair on a unicorn towards the end of the movie, but this plot device fails to work when she still has nothing to do when she shows up. Jim Broadbent, as the author of the book whose villains are trying to take over our world, appears to be the one who can save everyone and, in the end, still manages to be rather useless. Even Brendan Fraser does very little to save the day, leaving the plot in the hands of daughter Meggie (played by Eliza Bennett). It’s always fun to watch Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent hang around with brightly colored special effects, but did they really need to waste their time in this movie?
Add this to the fact that the story, for all of its magical wisdom, really makes very little sense. It’s never made clear what comes out of a book and what goes in at any given point in time, and the laws of the world change frequently enough that they only seem to be governed by what is needed for the plot at any point in time. If Mo had this power his entire life, it seems highly implausible that he wouldn’t know it until his mid thirties (wouldn’t he notice various people and objects disappearing and popping up around him whenever he read out loud?). And all of this pales in comparison to the greatest mystery of all- why is Mo American and Meggie British, when they’ve lived and traveled together for all of Meggie’s life?
That said, this movie is harmless. It has a nice message about the wonder of classic literature and is a fun enough movie for kids to see on a lazy night. And, if all else fails, enjoy the trailer for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince before the movie starts.
Grade: B
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