'Inkheart': Where's the fantasy? Where's the fun?

Instead of a romp with book characters coming alive, it's as flat as the pages it's drawn from ** ( 2 STARS)

Fraser and Bennett share a lovely rapport. But Helen Mirren is shockingly off-key as the girl's book-enthralled Great-Aunt Elinor (she does earn a giggle when she spots a nostril-print on a glass display case). And Serkis brings far less expression to Capricorn than he did to his digitalized face and form as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Paul Bettany conjures some touching confusion in the role of the scarred, scraggly Dustfinger, a juggler and fire-eater who longs to get back to the Dark Ages and his adored and adoring wife (Jennifer Connelly, that actor's real-life wife). By contrast, Rafi Gavron offers artificial exuberance in the role of Farid, an escapee from Arabian Nights.

Such recent documentary hits as Wordplay and Spellbound dwarf this film by demonstrating the power of language to generate drama and ignite comedy. To rouse the magic of literature, Softley mostly offers shots of Meggie as she hears books murmuring to her in banal aural montages. Only for one brief moment does everything click - when the author who created Dustfinger sees his character in the flesh and deems him just as he'd imagined - and that's mostly because Jim Broadbent, who plays the writer, brims over with delight.

The one undiluted virtue of The Reader, an adult movie also based on an international best-seller by a German author, is that it captures reading's all-encompassing allure. Inkheart isn't a smartly literary movie, and it isn't much of an adventure, either. Despite the escalating frenzy of the action, it remains emotionally becalmed.

I grew to wish the filmmakers had built more of the fantasy around Mo's day-to-day profession of saving wounded tomes. I might even have accepted those choruses of talking books if this were a different movie: The Book Whisperer, perhaps.

Inkheart

(New Line Cinema) Starring Brendan Fraser, Paul Bettany, Helen Mirren. Directed by Iain Softley. Rated PG for fantasy action, some scary moments. Time 106 minutes.

not reviewed

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