Film Reviews

Beastly

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Alex Pettyfer
• Details: US/86 mins (12A)

An awkward retelling of a classic fairytale, this film couldn't find an audience in America after a delayed release and it's easy to see why. Despite an appealing cast for its core audience no one turned up to see Beastly. At its centre is a horribly stilted romance, while exchanges between other characters are as far from natural as cinema gets.
Current Hollywood hottie Alex Pettyfer plays a handsome, but arrogant young man who gets on the wrong side of the school witch. The victim of a spell that makes him deformed for a year unless he finds true love, he retreats to a house in New York and hides his dodgy new mush from the public. But love may exist in the form of former classmate Vanessa Hudgens, who may just see him for the changed man he is.
Beastly doesn't push a particularly bad angle for retelling Beauty and the Beast. A once popular, handsome and rich teen learns the error of his ways by finding the (outsiders) shoe on the other foot, and falling in love in the process. It's primed for its core audience before you even see a trailer; but very little about it actually works. On the plus side Pettyfer and Hudgens are at least passable in their roles, but the muted direction smothers any sparks they may have had. Neil Patrick Harris is the best of the bunch as a wise, blind man who lives with our deformed hero.
It should really have been a guilty pleasure, full of romance and angst-ridden regret. But instead Beastly is boring, flat and lacking in sparks.

Review by Mike Sheridan