ENCHANTED

I'm sure it will come as no surprise that logic fails this movie on many fronts.

As someone who counts The Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty among my all-time favorite films, I would say that I'm "down" with the Disney princesses. My heart even leapt a little at the thought of running into Ariel at Disneyland, so I don't think I'm too cynical to find Enchanted enchanting. But I didn't. I kind of hated it. And here's why.

The movie begins in an animated fairy tale world where Giselle (voiced by Amy Adams) sings with the animals and waxes poetic about prince charming. She's kind of deranged-looking and wild-eyed, so right away all the singing and twirling takes on a manic quality. Then an ogre chases her around and she's rescued by her prince. Before they can have their happily ever after, the prince's mother (an evil witch voiced by Susan Sarandon) sets out to destroy Giselle! She begins by sending our poor princess to a place where there are no happy endings—New York City.

Now in a live-action world, we join the actual Amy Adams as she tries to get her bearings in a harsh and unfamiliar place. It's Robert (Patrick Dempsey) who takes pity on our heroine after his daughter, Morgan, spies A PRINCESS!!!! He takes her home so she can use the phone, or the yellow pages, or whatever, but the whole thing is a little fishy, because he had a cell phone and a taxi he could have offered her from the get-go. It's kind of like lugging a lost puppy home in the hope that maybe, just maybe, you'll get to keep it. Anyway, Giselle promptly falls asleep, so basically, they get to keep her.

In the morning, Giselle summons the animals to tidy the apartment. Since she's in the city, only rats, roaches, and pigeons show up, but she welcomes them in, sings a song, and soon the whole place is spotless. When Robert and his daughter wake up, they don't freak out, they don't get mad, they just sort of shoo all the vermin out the doors and windows. Robert has no reaction to Morgan holding two giant sewer rats by the tails. Oh, but later, when Giselle's chipmunk friend shows up at the pizza parlor, he screams like a girl and says, "Think of all the diseases on that thing!" Yeah, because we all know chipmunks are filthy, but rats are right-on. Rub one against your cheek if you like - they're clean. I'm sure it will come as no surprise that logic fails this movie on many fronts. Like when Giselle makes dresses out of the curtains, and not in a Sound Of Music kind of way, but in a dress-shaped-hole-in-the-drapery kind of way.

As the movie progresses, Robert becomes more and more enchanted with Giselle's sunny optimism. He's a divorce attorney who's been burned by love, and his current relationship is about as flat and calculated as it could be. In sharp contrast, Giselle never wavers in the belief that her prince is coming, and indeed he is. Played by James Marsden, the prince couldn't be more annoying, and he's joined in his quest for Giselle by one of the queen's henchman, who's just itching to feed her a poison apple.

The only highlight of this parallel storyline is Giselle's little friend Pip, a hilarious animated chipmunk who has her best interests at heart. I actually laughed out loud as he pantomimed a witch conning a princess into eating a poison apple ("It's good!"), and I was horrified when the henchman hung little Pip in the closet to get him out of the way. Seriously, he hangs Pip on a pants hanger by his little paws, and apart from the fact that it would probably pull his little arms out of the sockets, it would completely crush his tiny paws. Are we not supposed to notice this?

By now I'm sure you've guessed that Giselle and Robert get together at the end of the movie. Along the way there are more poison apples, true love's first kiss, a ball, a forgotten shoe, and various other fairy tale references, but ultimately I found them tired and trite. Besides, there's something a little weird about the relationship between Robert and Giselle. In one of the final scenes, they're just twirling around the house with Morgan, and I couldn't help thinking that Giselle would be more like a daughter than a wife to him. The little girl is the only thing that saves the whole situation from being completely creepy. I know I'm alone in my feelings, but I just don't see the charm in Enchanted.

DVD NOTES

Extra features include deleted scenes, bloopers, a making-of featurette, and a pop-up adventure with the delightful Pip the chipmunk.