Beastly

You know the line from the classic song, “Tale as old as time.” Well apparently someone thought that tale needed updating. Beastly is a modern remake of Beauty and the Beast, which follows a good looking snob, Alex Pettyfer, who gets transformed into a fugly snob by a witch, Mary-Kate Olsen. He then has one year for someone to love him or he’ll stay fugly forever. Enter Venessa Hudgens, who is the unrealistically nice character forced into the unrealistic situation of living with Pettyfer when a drug dealer threatens her life. It is all one big fugly, unrealistic mess. Every plot update comes off as forced and loses the edge the original story has. For example, the original story has a rose, which loses its petals as time passes. This story has a tattoo that will bloom roses as time winds down. It’s a forced attempt to be hip and it fails miserably at that.

With respect to the target audience, which is apparently teenage girls, there is hardly an attempt to be relevant. The script repeats the film’s theme over and over as if the audience would not be able to pick it up on their own. Yes, looks aren’t everything. At the beginning the character believes they are. At the end he realizes they aren’t. Everyone gets it. The movie would have done better by developing the characters more thoroughly.

Never has an actor saved a movie more than Neil Patrick Harris does in Beastly. He plays the blind tutor, who teaches Pettyfer that love is blind… how subtle. But he has a half-dozen laugh out loud moments and many others that break the awkward tension. To end on a positive note, the resolution is well done. I found myself actually being hooked for the first time in the 85-minute film. Young adult movies do not need to tip toe around the casual movie going audience. Beastly is like a poor man’s Twilight without the drama. I would have enjoyed it as a TV movie, but it’s not worth the ticket price. (3.9 out of 10)