Review of Beastly (2011) by Jiana W — 09 Oct 2011

It's a modern update of the classic "Beauty and the Beast" story. A selfish, good-looking popular high school student named Kyle publically humiliates the class weirdo, who is a witch. The scorned girl curses Kyle with ugliness (i.e., baldness, scars, dark markings that resemble tree branches) and if he does not find someone to love him within a year, he will be stuck this way forever. A random event opens the door for this seemingly impossible task when Kyle witnesses Lindy's addict father in trouble with a dealer. Kyle takes this incident as a chance to blackmail Lindy's dad into letting her live with him until this dangerous situation blows over. With Lindy now living under his roof, Kyle goes into Romeo mode and tries to win her love in various ways.

Being a fairy tale, this is the type of film that requires suspension of disbelief and if an audience can't do that, it generally has more to do with the film itself than the viewers. Can a "Beauty and the Beast" remake be done (successfully) when it is set during modern times? I would like to think so, if placed in the right hands. The writers of "Beastly" evidently are not "the right hands". Everything in this movie rings hollow and is unconvincing, from the acting to the dialogue to the situations/events. The thing that was the hardest to believe about the animated version was how fast Belle fell in love with her captor (about 3 days) but somehow it still managed to work out for the movie. "Beastly" has an entire YEAR to make their main characters' relationship plausible but still fails.

There's also a major problem here in the showing vs. telling category. For instance, instead of showing us Kyle's vanity through other means, he's just so obvious about his conceit in verbal ways that it becomes very annoying, very quickly. When they have the characters telling you all kinds of stuff about themselves via dialogue instead of the film showing us through their actions and whatnot, you know you're in trouble. Isn't that like Writing For Film 101? Showing versus telling issues aside, I found nothing particularly edgy about this movie and it's clear that it really wants to be.

I didn't have high expectations going into this but I was hoping that maybe I'd be surprised, like I've been many times before. Unfortunately, this was just as bad, maybe even a little worse, than I originally pictured it to be. It almost had a "Twilight" vibe to it.

On the positive side, Kyle/Hunter's makeup is really cool-looking.