followed—not entirely voluntarily, I might add—both the Alex Pettyfer and Vanessa Hudgens oeuvres so far, I was hardly holding my breath for Beastly, where these two pretty faces collide. Based loosely on Alex Flinn’s young-adult novel, the film is a modern-day reimagining of the Beauty and the Beast tale, and in its defense, one that makes no pretensions about being packaged for a Miley Cyrus worshipping demographic. Despite this disclaimer, which in itself indicates a butchery of the classic to some degree, you will still marvel at the sheer level to which Beastly sinks. It is astonishingly, gloriously bad. The wafer-thin plot opens in an elite Manhattan high-school, where self-proclaimed “popular, rich and good-looking” ab-cruncher Kyle Kingson (Pettyfer) is running for President of some committee (don’t even ask). During a speech to his fellow students, he makes his stance clear: if you’re not blessed with a commendable bone-structure, you’re not fit to roam the halls. Watching disapprovingly from the sidelines are Goody-Two-Shoes “scholarship kid” Lindy Taylor (Hudgens) with something of a crush on Kingson, and classmate Kendra (Mary-Kate Olsen, all on her own!), who is a witch. Yes, a witch. Sick of his put-downs and general douchebaggery, Kendra—parading it seems the entirety of Jean-Paul Gaultier’s gothic-inspired fall line—casts a spell on Kyle that turns him ‘ugly’, doomed to remain so for eternity if he doesn’t find someone to love him within the next year. Oooh.
Now, just put aside the incongruity of this absurd magical twist. If you’re picturing Kyle turned into some sort of cool, hairy, hideous monster, you’re in for a surprise. Evidently reluctant to put off an audience inclined towards sparkly vampires, filmmakers ensure that Kyle’s transformation is limited to a shaved head, a number of facial tattoos and piercings, and some scarring. To be honest, he actually looks better this way. And strangely, everyone just accepts his condition sans question, including his comically negligent father who only briefly wonders about “face transplants”. The kid has been disfigured! Overnight! Why isn’t anyone calling the freaking police?!
The now all black-wearing Kyle is banished to an apartment with only Jamaican housekeeper Zola (an accent-pounding Lisa Gay Hamilton) and blind tutor Will (why Neil Patrick Harris, why?) for company. Cue in prolonged spiritual epiphany, which begins, unsurprisingly, with deactivating his social network account (shock!). As for the little problem of finding love to break the curse, Kyle sets his sights on Lindy, who has now ticked off every box in the ‘artsy’ requisites with her love for poetry, her night-time visits to the homeless, and oh yes, that to-die-for trip to Machu Picchu. With time running out, the film falls on one of the most idiotic, too-ridiculous-to-even-explain plot devices to get Lindy (who is dumb enough not to recognise Kingson until the very end) to move into Kyle’s lodgings, so they can begin falling in love. And so they do, in a fashion more cumbersome than an Amanda Seyfried movie. She learns to trust, he learns to...uh…love himself? Other people? I have no idea. I’ve personally never been more relieved to see that familiar scroll of credits.
A major issue here is the lackluster presence of the leads. Pettyfer reprises the woodenness of his alien act in I Am Number Four, speaking in a monotone that grates, and Hudgens, in all her candy-cuteness, should be given a one-way ticket back to East High. It also doesn’t help that the film consistently shoves its moral message—yes, yes, that inner beauty trumps outer beauty—down your throat in annoyingly literal, over-the-top philosophical chunks. And what’s more, the fact that none of the characters have any ounce of depth to them, and not a single one is even remotely bad-looking, renders the message of inner beauty somewhat convoluted, even hypocritical. Moderated with humour, it might’ve been palatable; Beastly, however, has zero laughs, despite deploying the sort of overly-slick lingo and contrived ‘witty’ banter that has plagued film like Juno, often sounding too smug to be natural, or funny.
While we’ve come to expect very little of tween films, having witnesses the likes of Red Riding Hood and the many forgotten Lindsay Lohan features, Beastly represents a whole new low, where the filmmakers have pulled together a random mix of magazine-cover gracers, slapped on a haphazard and nonsensical plotline and called it a movie. With no real emotional base, the film is a robotic, exhaustive watch. I rue the day I turned off a rousing episode of stupid people getting drunk on the Jersey Shore, for this.
Beastly DVDs are available in DVD outlets around Kathmandu.
