Title: Inkheart
Director: Iain Softley
Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes
Genre: Fantasy
Basically, this film is about Mortimer "Mo" Folchart (Brendan Fraser)and his daughter Meggie (Eliza Bennett) who possess the ability to read characters out of a book when read aloud and are known as "Silvertongue". Mo, unknown of his powers, read a storybook, Inkheart to his daughter when she was still a baby and loads of nasty characters came to life. However, as the saying goes, "what comes out must go in" :P, in exchange, Mo's wife Resa (Sienna Guillory) was absorbed into the story.
Mo and his daughter escaped with the help of another character of the storybook, Dustfinger (Paul Bettany) and has since tried to locate another copy of the storybook to release his wife from her imprisonment.
I must say that I had expected a movie to be on par with Stardust. However, it fell short of my expectations. The storyline, though quite original, is unable to draw me into the fantasy world. I rarely criticize a movie for the loopholes in their storyline, but this one is just a little bit too much. First, the story that Mo read is somehow does not coincide with what that came out. For example, when Mo read "the Wizard of Oz", only the twister came out but not Dorothy even though it was mentioned a few times. It seemed as though Mo can read a lot of characters in the storybook but can control who/what that comes out, which is not true.
However, IT IS a fantasy movie afterall, and I love anyhting that even borders on the fantasy genre. There were a few funny moments I guess, but either the writer did not attempt much to include much comedy or I didn't catch it since they are low in both quantity and quality.
Mo's daughter, Meggie reaction in knowing the truth about her mother's disappearance didn't make sense either. She was crying/ranting/raving that her father did not know whether her mother is alive or not... I mean, duh, does that mean that he should not attempt to save her mother?
Also, I am unsure why authors for almost every novels would want to portray the absurdity of the lengths that one can go in order to save their loved ones. Here's the scenario. Evil guy want Meggie to do something which will basically kill lots and lots of people. If Meggie doesn't do it, her mother will die. There are basically only two outcomes with this type of scenario if Meggie did what was told.
Outcome 1: Meggie did what was told and thousands of people die. Meggie's mother was saved but learned the truth and became devastated that her life was in exchange of thousands of innocent lives. Meggie also had a recurring nightmare of innocent people blaming her for their deaths.
Outcome 2: Meggie did what was told and thousands of people die, including her mother.
I cannot see a third outcome at all loh. Why on Earth would people still do all these stupid things without thinking about the outcome? And to make matters worse, the evil guy did mention that Meggie's mother would be sacrificed once Meggie did what she was told to do. So basically, her mother would either die early or die later. What kind of a deal was that?
Of course, even though it seemed that I mentioned only the negative stuff, it was not a too bad movie afterall... because Brendan is in the movie mah :P
Observation: Since they don't really need the real storybook to change the storyline, why on Earth did they not do that earlier and have to wait until the last possible moment to do so?
Bottomline: Well, at least it's better than "Bridge to Terabithia" :P
Bamboo Rating: 3.0 / 5.0
(Picture taken from www.yellownet.com)
