'Enchanted' Amy, and the movie is a fairy tale come true!

Rating: 8/10 (18 October 2008)

My Take: A very familiar fish-out-of-water Disney musical, but with great tunes, loving touches and an appealing performance by Amy Adams.
The Disney studios has done a long strain of mediocre to terminally bad works for such a time. Be it the banal THE WILD or the insufferable CHICKEN LITTLE, Disney might have hit rock bottom as far as the studio is concerned. But, after a long exhausting line of "Oh, boy!" efforts, I approached ENCHANTED with very low expectations. When I saw the posters for the film, I let out a small sigh of hopelessness that Disney will ever get out of its mediocre status. But when the film started to stir up a buzz, I was forced to get sucked into this immediately. The critics praised the film as "sweet" and "refreshing". The Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes.com ranked it with, not just a passable, but a high rating of 93%. Pretty high for a simple film like this, but I took the time to see this film on video after missing it on the big screen.
The film opens with an animated sequence, which was just as awful as I'd expect. The animation sequence was lacking in anything I liked about Disney. By this point, I was about to give up. I was glad I didn't! After the tiresome animated opening, the movie evolves into a sweet, funny and often refreshing rom-com, in fact much more entertaining than most I've seen in years. It's also satisfies as the best Disney movie in a long time, and it's really been a long time, so it's worth seeing.
Perhaps one of the main reasons why the movie makes a terrific return to form is the return of Academy Award-winning composer Alan Menken, who serves up a series of energetic and lovable musical numbers and lavish songs to come along with it. Other than that, the real star of the film is Amy Adams as the fish-out-of-water Princess Giselle. Fans might remember her from her Oscar-nominated performance from JUNEBUG, which earned the hearts of critics. Her performance here is another winner. In fact, she carries the entire movie right along her winsome and blissful performance as a clueless princess, kicked out from her candy-coated paradise and transported into the world without any happily ever afters, modern New York City. Patrick Dempsey plays the divorce lawyer who comes to her aid, much to the insistence of his princess-loving daughter (Rachel Covey). On the other hand, Giselle's true husband-to-be Prince Edward (A surprisingly joyous James Marsden) goes down the same well and arrives in New York in search of his beloved (in one scene, Edward points a sword to a construction worker and says "I seek a beautiful girl!". The worker replies "I'd like to find one of them too!") Supporting performances by Timothy Spall as Edward's right-hand man Nathaniel who apparently happens to work with an evil witch (a rarely-used Susan Sarandon), who also happens to be Edward's evil stepmother who wants to prevent her son to get married. Among the other pleasures of the film is the twists on their old fashioned fairy tales. Like, for example, Nathaniel tries to poison Giselle with three poisoned apples in many of outrageous ways (namely, caramel apples on a stick, apple martini). The good thing about the film is that it's so joyous and blissful that audiences are guaranteed to smile at the thing for it's entire running time. And if that's all I can ask in a movie like ENCHANTED (I guess it really is), then Disney delivers immensely.
Rating: **** out of 5.