Early Review: ‘Inkheart’

Brendan Fraser’s new family adventure film ‘Inkheart’ has no heart at all, just ink on 120 pages of a script. The concept and premise are alluring, but it never delivers more than a basic and elemental movie experience. Instead of engaging the senses, the film only provides apathy. In addition, the film targets infant and juvenile audiences, but makes no excuses of including adults. Parents beware, you are going to have a hard time maintaining any interest after the first 15 minutes.

The story focuses on a young girl (Eliza Hope Bennett) who discovers that her father (Brendan Fraser) has an amazing talent to bring literature characters to life and must try to stop a freed villain from destroying them all, with the help of her father, her aunt (Helen Mirren), and a storybook’s hero (Paul Bettany).

The acting is neither uproarious nor dreadful, just bland. Fraser gives you the ol’ nice guy acting he consistently does well, young newcomer Bennett shows potential and Mirren and Bettany are too good for the film – and it is noticeable.

The demise of ‘Inkheart’ comes at the misuse of its premise – the director Iain Softley could have trounced us with creativity – the deliberate manipulation of the laws of storytelling to suit the story’s shortcomings and the inconsistencies of a stale and uninspired script.

It’s interesting to note, the movie’s message is to have us indulge in the journey of our imagination, but all it achieves is to be lifeless and forgettable.