Review: Beastly

Grade: C-

Upside: Neal Patrick Harris.

Downside: Everything else, especially the complete absence of subtlety and blatant pandering to the Twilight crowd.

Poor Alex Pettyfer.

Kid’s just getting his break and he’s had to play a knockoff Edward Cullen twice.

On the heels of playing an angsty love struck alien teen in I Am Number Four, he anchors a modern take on Beauty and Beast as an angsty love struck deformed teen in the aptly named Beastly.

Word on the street is already pretty damning about this flick—we’re talking “worst movie of the year” heat. But, come on, based on the trailers alone, did anyone think this was going to be high, or even moderately entertaining, art? Beastly is a tepid retread of the classic “true beauty is on the inside” fable designed to appease Twilight fans while they wait for Breaking Dawn.

Pettyfer stars as Kyle Kingston, a pompous, rich pretty boy who worships physical attractiveness and is king of the hill at a swank Manhattan high school that looks more like an office building. On his way to becoming president of the school’s vague environmental committee, he steps over shy, smart girl Lindy—Vanessa Hudgens playing her go-to ‘soulful, smart outsider’ character from everything she’s been in—and draws the ire of resident creepy goth/emo witch Kendra—Mary-Kate Olsen, clearly drawing from her own experience and wardrobe. After embarrassing, Kendra, Carrie-style, at a school dance, Kyle is cursed to live as a ‘tattooed freak’ who must find true love within a year. Removed from his cushy life in Gossip Girl adjacent by his equally conceited newscaster father—played with flat villiany by Parenthood and Six Feet Under's Peter Krause—Kyle spends half that time acting like he's maturing and trying to cajole Hudgen's Lindy to fall for him.

Pettyfer expands slightly on his role from Number Four. Instead of being stoic and boiling with teenage rage, he’s boiling with teen rage while being stoic and arrogant. See the difference there. Thankfully, he has a solid supporting cast, including the earthy Lisa Gay Hamilton as his forgiving Jamaican maid (not quite as bad as it sounds, but close) and the perennially awesome Neil Patrick Harris. NPH plays blind tutor to Pettyfer’s Kyle during his exile to the outer boroughs and it is his impeccable comic timing, razor wit and barely-contained exasperation that single-handedly saves this flick from being a complete waste. Think of NPH as the clever, wry voice of enlightened annoyance in the face of teen melodrama. If only there, were someone like that in Twilight…

Aside from a few solid performances, Beastly is generally a mild and forgettable experience with its greatest flaw being the pitiable lack of subtlety. Want to know how a character in Beastly feels? Give them a second and they’ll tell you, at the top of their lungs. The lack subtlety even extends to the direction. Director Daniel Barnz packs Beastly with extreme close-ups and gratuitous musical cues to punctuate the already thick melodrama. If it weren’t for a handful of reflective moments peppered throughout the 90-minute run time, there would be no clue that this was made after the late 90s. It is also noticeably light on action. Considering this is supposed to be an edgy update, one would think there be some significant action sequences to keep the 18-34 demo invested. With only one remotely thrilling scene, Beastly manages to deliver less action than the 20-year old Disney version. Beastly is definition of ‘meh.’ Uninspired, unoriginal and nowhere near unforgettable. The target crowd—Twilight fans and pre-tween girls—will eat this up, but most audiences will be too busy rolling their eyes at the over cooked melodrama to let this one take a place in their memory.