Better Than You Think: Beastly (2011)

                                                         "I guess this cage set me free."

Directed/Written by  Daniel Barnz
Cast                         Alex Pettyfer
                                 Vanessa Hudgens
                                 Mary-Kate Olsen
                                 Neil Patrick Harris

Plot
Kyle (Alex Pettyfer) thinks he is God's gift at his high school. He plays a prank on a fellow high school student, Kendra (Mary-Kate Olsen) who, unbeknown to him is a witch. Kendra teaches him a lesson by putting a curse on him making him as beastly on the outside as he is on the inside. He has one year to find someone to fall in love with him or stay like that forever.


   This movie...isn't great. It's cheesy, dumb, and doesn't even begin to approach the original source material. Based on a retelling of Beauty and the beast by Alex Flinn, Beastly was released last year, to a pretty poor critical reception, and didn't make much of a splash outside the US. It would be easy to rip on this movie, but that's not how we do things down on Planet Positive. So yes, it's not very good. But is it watchable? Absolutely. Read on...

     If you're looks we're determined by the type of person you were on the inside, would you be ugly, or beautiful? In the case of Kyle, he'd look like a meth addict who crashed his motorcycle into a tattoo parlour. Alex Pettyfer plays our vain, douchebag protagonist, transformed into a hideously disfigured version of himself after he ridicules and humiliates his high school's resident witch Kendra. He has one year in which to find someone who falls in love with him, or he'll stay like that forever. It is at this point I should probably mention Kendra is played by Mary Kate Olsen. Yes that's right, one of the Olsen twins is in this movie. That, along with the casting of High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens as Kyle's love interest, automatically lowers this film's street cred to below a Vanilla Ice and Justin Beiber duet.
      However, if the cast list alone is turning you off, here's something that may convince you to give it a shot; Neil Patrick motherfucking Harris. I can honestly say without a hint of irony that NPH is totally awesome and a strong candidate for coolest man alive. Sure, he's probably never going to be an Oscar winning leading actor, but as the womanising Barney in How I Met Your Mother, a hilarious parody of himself in the Harold and Kumar movies, or Kyle's blind tutor in Beastly, he owns the screen. There's just something about the guy that is so damn charming, I cant help but like anything he's in. NPH shares some good dialogue with Pettyfer, and their scenes together are a highlight.

     The rest of the cast do a decent enough job too. With Pettfer being extremely unlikable before and sometimes after his transformation, until it becomes clear he's merely a product of his even more unlikable father (played by Six Feet Under's Peter Krause). Hudgens is good enough as the female lead, with teenage drama and romance no doubt coming pretty easy to her after being in the HSM series. Mary Kate Olsen is...passable as a Wiccan emo. She is in no way a good actress but her scenes are kept short and she is somewhat protected by writer/director Daniel Barnz  (who wrote and directed indie favourite Phoebe in Wonderland). The plot moves along nicely, and there's only a couple of scenes that drag slightly. The make up and effects used to show Alex post-transformation are the only thing I'll criticise here. Don't get me wrong, they did an excellent job and the full body make up took a mammoth seven hours to apply, and he DOES look pretty mangled, but if you saw him walking down the street you'd just think he was a junkie or was into hardcore body modification.

                              Pretty sure I've seen this guy hanging around Camden Town station.



     Still, I suppose they had to keep Pettyfer recognisable for the poster and make it believable someone could fall in love with him in such a state. Fans of the original Beauty and the Beast will probably hate this movie, but it honestly is better than you think.


Final Verdict

Beastly is in no way a classic, but is by no means bad. If you like some nice cheesy American romance, check it out. At the very least, you can grab a few drinks and a friend and have a laugh. Also, did I mention Neil Patrick motherfucking Harris is in this?
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