Review of Princess Protection Program (2009) by Christal J — 13 Oct 2012

This film is bad in all the fun ways. Princess Protection Program is a Disney Channel movie that stars Camp Rock's Demi Lovato as a princess who is forced to flee her nation after an evil general takes over it and enslaves her mother one month before she is to be crowned Queen.

Princess Lovato takes is relocated by a secret organization dedicated to protecting princesses and is forced to take refuge in Louisiana with tomboy Carter Mason, played by Wizards of Waverly Place's Selena Gomez.

The first problem with the film lies with its' premise. If you can't get around the idea that there is a whole government agency dedicated to protecting princesses in distress, then you might as well turn the TV off now, as the whole "princess" concept is taken to huge extremes throughout the film.

However, if you can survive that, then the rest of the movie still has nothing to offer you; unless you happen to be a 12 year old girl. It's clear that the writers didn't actually care about the film enough to put real effort into it.

The plot is very cliched, the moral is forced, and while Gomez and Lovato are well developed, all the other characters are either lame stereotypes or exist only to please one element of the plot, and then are thrown away to be completely forgotten.

While there are funny moments in the film, for the most part the humor includes predictable fish out of water jokes, or simply laughing over how little Disney understands teenagers. That said, this film is kind of fun in how bad it is.

I'm not calling it a B movie, per say, but the way it falls flat, isn't really as painful as it is humerus. While many will appreciate what it's trying to do, which is saying that anyone could be a princess, the moral of the film is neither very well developed, or very natural.

While I do support the idea of films having moral lessons, I've always believed that those lessons should be subtle. If you have to outright say what you're trying to get across, then you clearly aren't doing the best job at telling a story.

Overall, Princes Protection Program falls flat because the people who made it decided that just because the premise is silly, it means that the film can't be very good or complex. While the premise is silly, and will by itself alienate a lot of people, that doesn't mean you can't make fun of it.

While the premise is somewhat taken for laughs, they do act like the idea of it is perfectly sane, while in my opinion it would have been funnier had they parodied the fact that the idea of a Princess Protection Program is silly.

While I do imagine that preteen girls or very, very, very nostalgic adults will probably enjoy it, most of us probably would look at the premise, and decide against giving it a try. 2 out of 5 stars.