Fridae

I’m sure that on paper, Beastly sounded like a great idea: why not tell the done-to-death fairy tale from the perspective of the Beast and set it in a modern day high school? We’d get the Twilight fans for sure!

Perhaps Alex Flinn’s novel was well-executed and clever and hip; sadly, we can’t say the same with Daniel Barnz’s film adaptation. Right from the beginning, it’s already on the wrong foot - our Beast here is Kyle (played by new face Alex Pettyfer), a shallow, rich, good-looking high school jock-jerk cursed by vengeful Wiccan Mary-Kate Olsen to look as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside. The problem is she transforms him into a high school goth with artistic body tattoos (check out the exotic Arabic tats on his eyebrows), silver etchings, and scars that UK singer Seal would die for. He still has his pretty cut physique, for crying out loud! You’d think that he’d be mobbed by goth boys and girls in his school, post-transformation.

Watching Kyle moan and bitch about being ugly and unwanted is as hilarious as watching an unmasked Gerard Butler go psychotic in Phantom of the Opera even though the makeup department merely gave him what ordinary people would call a mild facial swelling from a food allergy.

To break the curse, Kyle must woo the heart of someone who will love him for who he is. In this film, it’s schoolmate Lindy – a charmless bookworm who seems to channel the insipid blandness of Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan (Twilight). Because both of them are either shallow teens with the abysmal inter-personal skills of their peers or actors cursed with a script with wordy, terrible dialogue, Neil Patrick Harris drops in as a badass blind kungfu master (he does throw darts with deadly accuracy after all) and private tutor to matchmake the two.

As the equivalent of Lumiere in this Beauty and the Beast adaptation, Neil Patrick Harris steals the show in every scene he appears, giggling and grinning his way through a film with badly-written, clunky dialogue. If you’re in on the joke with NPH, you might enjoy this. Otherwise, you’d find Twilight has more charm, silly wit, and campier bad dialogue.