Review of Tooth Fairy (2010) by Chads. — 22 Jan 2010

With Santa Claus, there's territorial boundaries involved, which preclude the appearance of any potential transgression between the tooth fairy and his client. For starters, Santa is situated in the living room, where he eats the cookies and drinks the milk, then climbs back up the chimney.

It's the children who do the spying, not the other way around. Santa doesn't enter bedrooms, unlike the tooth faeries, male(!) tooth faeries, that Lily(Julie Andrews) recruits into her guild: grown men in effeminate ballerina outfits who reach under children's pillows and leave behind a dollar bill, hopefully, for just the tooth.

Whereas no background search appears to be needed for Derek(Dwayne Johnson), a journeyman hockey player doing time for a second-rate minor league hockey team(shades of "Bull Durham), Ziggy(Seth McFarland), on the other hand, a colleague who sells Derek black market tooth faerie paraphernalia, seems decidedly less clean-cut, hardly the sort of man any parent would want hovering above their unconscious child.

In "Tooth Fairy", a sort of "Men in Baby Blue"(it borrows liberally from the Will Smith vehicle), parents apparently aren't the purveyors of magic, the ones who ante up the buck to facilitate the tooth faerie myth, since magic exists.

That's the conceit put forward by one group of writers: the presumption that some stranger will break into homes to provide a service for those parting ways with their baby teeth. Another group of writers, however, ignorant to the movie's most fundamental rule(tooth faeries exist), have it both ways, in an incongruous scene where some father enacts the tooth faerie role, therefore relegating the whole profession back to the world of make-believe, because it's parents all along, who provide their offspring with magic.