Beastly Review

Beastly is far from being a successful reimagining of Beauty and the Beast, but it isn't the utter failure that many critics are writing it off as.  The film boasts a clever central concept for updating the tale as old as time for today's tween crowd, and though it stumbles quite a bit along the way, the underlying message still comes out quite clearly.  Plus, there's some fun to be had along the way.

This is a story that is etched into the collective cultural awareness at a generally early age, courtesy of the Disney masterpiece, but now it's being aimed squarely at the middle school crowd, the demographic that can most probably benefit from taking its message to heart.  Singing dishes are absent here, but the supporting characters still manage to steal the show, most notably Neil Patrick Harris, whose blindness is too obvious a move to be truly effective, but whose great comic timing serves as the film's greatest strength.  At times, Harris seems to be playing a blind version of Barney from How I Met Your Mother (if you've never seen the show, shame on you), and at others, he attains a fine note of sweetness and encouragement for the newly-crowned beast Kyle, played by newly-crowned It Boy Alex Pettyfer, who starred in I Am Number Four earlier this year.

Pettyfer doesn't do much with his role, as there isn't much he can do.  He starts off as the pretty popular jerk, gets turned ugly by the school's resident witch (Mary-Kate Olsen, in a bit of odd but not-bad casting), and learns how to love courtesy of brainy Vanessa Hudgens, who finds sanctuary in the secret apartment after her father is involved in a drug deal gone bad.  It's a messy translation, to be sure, but it gets everyone where they need to be, and once the players are in place, things move along as expected, with some genuinely affecting moments.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is Pettyfer's make-up, which is so strange and jarring that it's almost hard to make a judgment.  The concept is a bit slapdash and even stupid, with vine tattoos curling into words such as "ugly" and "embrace the suck," unintentionally comedic details that undermine the startling overall effect that saps Pettyfer of his natural good looks.  It's certainly a better avenue than slathering him with fur, but a little more self-control in the design department would've been nice.

Pettyfer and Hudgens have fair chemistry, at least as good as you expect to find in one of the Twilight movies, and their characters' relationship is made more interesting by their previous "history," if that's an applicable word in this instance.  Of course, things work out quite tidily, giving each character his or her respective happy ending, save Kyle's looks-obsessed father, whose fate generates the film's last laugh.  It's a typically goofy last move for a tween romance, but it serves as a nice note that reasserts the film's message, as though an extra reminder is necessary.  For the definitive version of the story, Disney can't be beat, but I, for one, don't fault Beastly for trying.  It fails, but just barely, and its successful elements shouldn't be discounted in light of the less successful whole.