Ella Enchanted
Studio: Miramax Films
Website: http://www.miramax.com/ella_enchanted/
Release Date: 2004-04-09
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Joanna Lumley, Cary Elwes, Minnie Driver, Steve Coogan
Director: Tommy O’Haver
Screenwriter: Kirsten Smith
WorkNameSort: Ella Enchanted
Our Rating: 0.00
If you picked the four dimmest attendees at a Renaissance fair and told them to go remake “The Princess Bride,” you’d get something like this cloying stomach-churner, which uses fairy-tale settings and characters to effect a simple-minded satire of modern-day girl power. The pitch: The fair Ella of Frell (Anne Hathaway) wants to rid the kingdom of bigotry, but her good intentions are impeded by a lifelong spell that compels her to do anything anyone commands of her. In the Orlando Weekly offices, this idea was adjudged the ideal grounding for a porno flick — and you should have heard what some of the guys had to say about it — but it’s a good hour before Ella’s princely crush (Hugh Dancy) hits on the idea of ordering her to kiss him. So of course the whole chaste affair is over before we get to hear him decree, “Now impersonate a sump pump.” Ella’s impassioned speeches, which equate free enterprise with enslavement, are a nice change from the materialism of most teen-targeted movies, but her sentiments are rendered moot by the movie’s unbearably insipid jokes and characterizations. The story even stops dead at one point so that Hathaway can mug through a lousy rendition of Queen’s “Somebody to Love.” Can’t anybody find us someplace good to fwow up?
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2004.