Mike Does Beastly

“Best embrace the suck.”

The Scoop: 2011 PG-13 , Directed by Daniel Barnz and starring Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Hudgens and Mary Kate Olsen.

Tagline: Love is never ugly.

Summary Capsule: Popular, good-looking kid gets cursed with ugliness, and nothing else interesting happens for two hours.

Mike’s Rating: If I had moving tatoos, I think I’d want that animated .gif where Snooki gets punched in the face.

Mike’s Review: There’s a sad parallel between Beastly and its main character, Kyle. Both are extremely good-looking, but ultimately neither have any depth or profundity. And while Kyle eventually discovers that looks aren’t everything and it’s what inside that counts, the film itself remains sadly devoid of substance.

Pettyfer’s Kyle is an arrogant, image obsessed popular kid, meant to call to mind images of Sebastian from Cruel Intentions, but the one scene meant to convey this characterization veers too far into stereotypical “teen rich boy” clichés to be taken seriously. We’re not given any reason to hate him enough to think he deserves his fate, and we’re not given enough reason to like him for the rest of the movie. His transformation into a heavily tatooed and pierced version of himself  is nowhere near as visceral as the film wants us to think it is. He’s really not that hard on the eyes at all. One would assume he could go to a goth-punk bar and meet a girl who actually digs his new look.Vanessa Hudgens as Lindy is supposed to be an outsider due to her status as a scholarship student and her individuality. Apart from the fact that girls that look like Hudgens don’t actually suffer from unpopularity, she’s nowhere near as interesting as the story makes her out to be. Basically, she’s a generic love interest dujour, and there’s nothing in her performance that takes the character above that two-dimensional part. I’m reserving judgement until I see the performance Zack Snyder is able to get out of her in Sucker Punch, but between this and High School Musical, I’m starting to think she’s just a pretty face with no real emotional depth as an actress.

This film suffers immensely from a lack of an antagonist or any real conflict. Disney’s version of Beauty & the Beast solved this problem with the inclusion of Gaston, to outstanding effect. Somebody on this movie’s production team should have been taking notes, because at no point is the audience given any reason to assume that they’ll be given anything other than the happy ending they’re expecting. There’s no suspense, no real weight and no surprises. This is a bit sad, because several individual scenes, as well as the overall premise, have so much potential for gravitas and poignancy, but end up invariably falling flat.

It’s not as though Beastly is a complete stinker though. As I’ve mentioned the film is visually appealing. Kyle’s animated tatoos, the shots of New York in winter, and the way scenes transition to show the passage of time lend an otherwordly feel to the movie. The make-up job, all tatoos and scars with metal running though them, looks pretty cool.The performances aren’t all one-note either. Neil Patrick Harris as a blind tutor provides some genuinely funny moments, and Mary Kate Olsen is surprisingly good as the witch who curses Kyle.

In the long run, Beastly is a nice harmless teen fairy tale, which looks good enough to keep it from being a complete fail, but lacks any of the substance needed to make it worth seeing in the theater. Wait for it to go to Netflix and watch it while you’re doing something else…or I’ll curse you with a really bad skin rash…

Just like this guy.

Intermission:

• Because everything he does is awesome, Neil Patrick Harris wore opaque contact lenses so he would actually be sightless during filming.
  
• Zach Efron was considered for the role of Kyle/Hunter.
• The film was originally slated for release in 2010, but got moved back to avoid competing with the Zac Efron movie Charlie St. Cloud, as Efron and Vanessa Hudgens were dating. Later the film was moved forward for an earlier release so as not to coincide with Hudgen’s latest movie, the Zach Snyder-directed Sucker Punch.
• The movie is an adaptation of a young adult novel of the same name written by Alex Flinn, featuring many allusions to Beauty & the Beast, and chat room excerpts where Kyle talks to other teens who have been turned into monsters.
• The tatoos over Kyle’s eyebrows read “Embrace” and “Suck”.

Groovy Quotes:

Kyle: Best embrace the suck.

Kendra: Wow, looks are important to you.
Kyle: Very important to everyone. Except you. Clearly.
Kendra: Imagine life without them.

Kendra: You have a year to find someone to love you, or stay like this forever…As aggressively unattractive outside as you are inside.

Kyle: Please make this go away! I’ve learned my lesson!
Kendra: You’ve learned nothing. Find someone who can see better than you can.

Lindy: What’s with the mask?!
Kyle: I don’t wanna freak you out.
Lindy: Sure, the ski mask didn’t freak me out.

Kyle: (watching Will playing darts despite being blind) How do you do that?
Will: I went to a dance and a witch cursed me with a “dart hex”.

If you liked this movie, try these:

• Twilight
• The Craft
• The Phantom of the Opera

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