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Inkheart

It is more difficult to criticize a movie when there is nothing particularly offensive about it. Inkheart moves from point A to point Z fluently enough. The problem is that there is absolutely nothing noteworthy about the film. It is a flat, humdrum affair that might as well be background noise while you go about completing your daily chores.

I can name only two aspects of Inkheart that were even the least bit interesting. There is a very brief shot near the end that was a semi-impressive CGI effect of The Shadow monster and the performance of Andy Serkis. It is always nice to see Gollum causing havoc without the motion-capture suit. I'm a fan of Serkis, and I usually enjoy his acting. Unfortunately, he seems to appear in a lot of mediocre movies.

I have seen two other movies by the director of Inkheart, Iain Softley. Those were The Skeleton Key and K-Pax. Both were average films that were saved somewhat by a decent ending and the always entertaining Kevin Spacey. Softley has no signature style whatsoever. I did not see one attention-grabbing camera angle, the score was completely unnoticeable, and there were more thrilling special effects in the trailers for this summer's movies then there were in the entire runtime of Inkheart.

Brendan Fraser, who is sleepwalking through the entire production, plays Mo Folchart, a Silvertongue who has the ability to make characters from novels appear in the real world by reading aloud. This extraordinary skill leads to the release of a band of thugs from the novel Inkheart, led by Capricorn (Andy Serkis). For nine years, Capricorn has been brooding in a castle while searching for Mo in order to use his gift as a tool to get rich, rule the world, and unleash his pet beast, The Shadow. Another subplot involves Folchart's wife, who is first stranded inside Inkheart before being rescued by a stuttering Silvertongue. This leaves her with a speaking disability and as a captive of Capricorn. A third storyline involves Paul Bettany's character, Dustfinger, the cowardly juggler who can breathe fire. He has also been sucked out of Inkheart, and all he wants to do is go back into the book to be reunited with his wife, played by Bettany's real spouse, Jennifer Connelly. Finally, Folchart's daughter, Meggie, conveniently gains the power of a silvertongue in the middle of the movie so Capricorn can use her as his pawn instead. By the end of the film, everybody seems to have been captured and rescued at least twice and the blink-or-you'll-miss-it climax involves Meggie writing on her hand and reading aloud for thirty seconds. If what you just read sounds convoluted and boring, well, that's Inkheart.

The film does try to skip the standard 20 minutes of setup that is used in most fantasies and goes straight into the action. I normally appreciate it when a movie leaves its viewer slightly confused until offering an explanation at the halfway point. The director, however, ends up jamming too many things together in the beginning and loses the coherency of the story. Mo Folchart's ability to read words into reality is explained in the first scene while he reads to his baby girl and wife. Five minutes later, the focus shifts to Mo and his now young teenage daughter searching for an unknown book, and his wife is nowhere to be seen. Folchart enters a dusty room and suddenly, all the books start speaking to him. He finds the novel that he is looking for, Inkheart, opens it to a picture of a ferret, and the ferret materializes immediately outside to his daughter. The scene returns to Brendan Fraser flipping pages, and the camera focuses on a picture of a long-haired juggler. Like magic, Paul Bettany also appears. It is explained later on that these characters were released from the book nine years ago and have been following the Silvertongue ever since, but the movie is edited so poorly, it seems as if Folchart has the ability to bring characters to life just by looking at their picture. Why the books are speaking to him is another baffling question. So, Inkheart loses its audience within ten minutes. It is never a good idea to start a film on such a bad note. Personally, if I dislike the beginning of a film, it has to work twice as hard to recapture my attention. It has been done on occasion, but Inkheart is so lacking in excitement that my initial confusion soon changed to boredom, and it remained there until the credits began to roll.

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