Beastly (2011)

Beastly’s story is a familiar one: a previously handsome but shallow, wealthy prince is turned into a hideous beast by a curse and only true love can break the spell. But everything else in this Gossip Girl-inspired reimagining is as unappealing as the beast himself. Inside and out.

In this case, the cursed one is Kyle (former model Alex Pettyfer), a good-looking but obnoxious popular kid at a ritzy Manhattan private school. Early in the film, he wins an election for president of his school’s environmental club not because he actually gives a hoot about the trees or the dolphins but because he gives a speech exhorting his own beauty (“Should you vote for the rich, popular, good-looking guy with a famous news anchor dad? Hell, yeah!”) and insulting everyone who doesn’t share his stellar genetics, telling them to “embrace the suck.”

But Kyle goes a step too far when he humiliates the school’s fashion-forward, Wicca-dabbling goth, Kendra (Mary Kate Olsen). She afflicts him with a bunch of tribal body art, a bald head and some swollen, red facial scars. These are supposed to make him ugly but are actually an improvement over his bad highlights, fake-and-bake tan and preppy blazer look.

When Kyle’s equally shallow father (Peter Krause) discovers what’s happened to his son, he skips over the part where he is shocked and disbelieving that his kid’s been cursed by a real-live witch and straight to the part where he hides him away out of sight in a palatial Brooklyn brownstone. Right. Brooklyn is where people go when they DON’T want to be seen. Tell that to the New York Times.

Anyway, the “forgotten” outer borough is also the home of Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens), the nerdy scholarship kid from Kyle’s school, who met-cute and made smitten googly eyes at the jerky boy on his final day of school. Remember when nerdy girls in movies looked like pre-weight loss Ricki Lake, freckle-faced Molly Ringwald, or Joan Cusack in headgear and not like the girl you wished you could be in high school? Yeah, those were the days.

But getting back to the point, Lindy believes in substance over style. You know it because she says it in those exact words. That piece of dialogue pablum is intended to telegraph to the film’s–apparently stupid–target audience that Lindy is the beauty to Kyle’s beast.

Beastly’s screenwriter and director Daniel Barnz then includes a nonsensical scene where Lindy’s drug-addicted dad pisses off his dealer, who threatens to kill the girl. Kyle, who has been stalking…I mean, watching over her, convinces dear old dad to let Lindy move in with him in his parent-free abode. Wow, adults in Barnz’s world are awful human beings.

That’s with the exception of Kyle’s blind but still humorous tutor, Will (Neil Patrick Harris), and his Jamaican housekeeper, Zola (Lisa Gay Hamilton, whose Ja-fakin accent set my teeth on edge and prompted me to call my mom for a dose of the real thing). These two at least attempt to teach Kyle how to be a real boy with real human emotions deserving of love.

It’s too bad their efforts are all but wasted on Pettyfer, whose stiff, lifeless performance is never elevated beyond the cliché level of teen angst. At least Hudgens’ plastic Barbie finds her wooden Ken. Her character, who incidentally is as substance-free as everything she purports to abhor, apparently likes her boys cute and mean. Throughout most of the film, Kyle is as jerky and self-involved as he was before makeup artist Tony Gardener gave him the edgy, tatted-up upgrade in the looks department.

Even Barnz’s pretty but pointless directorial style makes it clear that Beastly has completely missed the point of the parable it’s supposed to be telling. Is it cool to watch a tattoo of a tree on Kyle’s arm change with the seasons? Sure. But it would have been cooler to see to a movie that doesn’t ask me to “embrace the suck.”