Reading as a source of love, mystery and terror - that's the laudable subject of the young-adult fantasy Inkheart, based on Cornelia Funke's engaging international best-seller about a man who can release characters from the page simply by reading aloud.
Cold, bland and gimmicky - that's how the movie has turned out.
On-screen the plot proves murky rather than intriguing. Brendan Fraser plays a guy named Mo, a loving father and regular fellow except for his profession. Mo is a "book doctor," an expert at repairing bindings, covers and pages. And he has a secret gift: He's a "Silvertongue," able to liberate storybook figures with the sound of his voice.
His 12-year-old daughter, Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett), thinks they travel around Europe in search of jobs restoring antique books' luster. He's actually seeking a single rare book, Inkheart, an adventure set in a fantasy world resembling medieval places and times. He's also trying to stay out of the clutches of that book's villain, Capricorn (Andy Serkis), whom Mo inadvertently released from its chapters nine years before.
Because the movie fails to create a dense fantasy atmosphere - the kind you can swim in, the way you "sink into" a book - the problems start right there. In the age of Google, anyone from 5 to 90 might find it hard to believe that Mo can't locate a book by a contemporary author that he read in the previous decade.
David Lindsay-Abaire, the screenwriter, never figures out how to bring audiences inside the fantasy, and Iain Softley, the director, loses the capacity he had in his early films (Backbeat, The Wings of the Dove) to bring us inside the characters. By the time they explain that Capricorn has been buying every copy he can find of Inkheart, the audience's patience has worn out on several fronts.
The filmmakers squander Funke's most delicious twist: that people and creatures from Mo's world enter a book once he brings its fictional figures out. On the rule of thumb that a reviewer should not reveal more of a novel's plot than its book-flap, this review won't reveal the crucial exile into Inkheart. An audience's concern for this character rests on some woefully insufficient scenes.
Lindsay-Abaire lets the plot leak out in little dribbles of squid-ink. He stays so focused on the next plot turn, chase or escape that the overarching architecture comes to ruin. And Softley lets too many actors sweat for laughs, tears and thrills.
