Imagination to the point of overkill...and beyond!

Rating: 6/10 (29 December 2007)

This is one of those rare modern properties that seems stuffed to bursting with good ideas. It also seems well able to carry off most of it's high flying whimsies. However, about half way through the film I began to notice a slight air of overcrowding and desperation. It was as if the enormous cast of very loud and very busy characters were tying themselves up in knots trying NOT to fall over each other. It seems a shame that the idea of the homicidal Princes who are forced to hang around after death waiting to see which of them ends up as king ends up competing for screen time with the rather more pedestrian nasty witches who seem to have been rather clumsily lifted from "Hocus Pocus". Perhaps these two factions might have somehow dovetailed together better without the LONG and far from convincing "Deniro as A NELLIE Pirate" nonsense...( couldn't "out" stars Rupert Everett or Ian McKellan take a second to tell SOMEBODY...ANYBODY how unfunny this was...or what a fool Bobbie D. was making of himself? As a gay man....I would gladly have given a little hint about it's being tasteless AND terribly done. I might have put it down to rather innocent insensitivity if the author of the original story hadn't used the word "Fairies" quite so blithely in an interview on the DVD).
All in all...there is a moderately appealing 95 minute movie buried in here somewhere...with several sharp and funny performances. Unfortunately the film is SO busy hopping around from plot thread to plot thread that NONE of the characters are ever fully developed...or given much chance to really shine...(which is a shame...because Danes seemed always on the verge of really beginning to glow).
A near miss...which deserved better than it's paltry box office take...
Better luck next time all around.