Instead, then, today's offering is Tooth Fairy, which is basically a non-seasonal re-write of The Santa Clause. It tells the story of minor-league hockey player Derek Thompson (Dwayne Johnson), whose dreams of being one of the all-time greats were crushed by injury several years previously. Depressed and disillusioned, he basically becomes a professional enforcer, tackling the opposing team's star players and taking them out of the game - a habit which earns him the nickname of the Tooth Fairy.
As might be expected, it's a name that eventually comes back to haunt him when, after getting caught stealing his girlfriend's daughter's tooth money from under her pillow to buy into a poker game, he explains to the girl that there's no such thing. His girlfriend is decidedly unimpressed, but worse is to come, when the following morning he finds a note beneath his own pillow, and it contains not money, but a summons. For the crime of disseminating disbelief, Derek has been sentenced to spend a week as a tooth fairy, wings, sparkle dust and all.
The good
When I selected this movie from the listings, I did so because I knew no matter how bad everything else about it might be, Johnson is one of the most charismatic men on the face of the planet. My reasoning was that he could redeem more or less anything.Was I right about this? Check the next section down, if you get my drift.
In fact, it was the veterans who carried this one for me. Julie Andrews only seems to get more beautiful as she ages, and Billy Crystal isn't doing badly for himself either. Her senior Fairyland executive and his slightly demented gadget man provided some of the very few high spots in a movie that was otherwise dim in every sense of the word.
I'm not sure what else I can add to the positive column here; there's no particularly glaring sexism or racism, I guess. There's no sizeism at all, either, but that's because with the exception of the slightly saggy Crystal, all the players are perfectly slim and cover-model pretty.
And that's it, really; normally I can find something to enchant me in just about any movie, but sadly this one left me completely cold.
The bad
I doubt that I'll be writing much here that you wouldn't already suspect, to be honest. Tooth Fairy suffers from a so-so script, slightly shoddy effects and the sort of soundtrack that might as well be an operatic aria in terms of the way it relentlessly tells you what's going to happen ten seconds or so before it actually does. All it really needs is a man with an electric cattle prod at your side whispering menacingly whenever he thinks you need to laugh or cry.What did surprise me, however, was quite what an unlikeable hero Dwayne Johnson proved to be. Now, call me a fangirl if you must, but I don't think the blame for this one lies entirely or even partly on his shoulders. It's just that the character of Derek Thompson was written to be such an unrelenting jerk - okay, we get it, he got burned when he was young and now he's a cynic. This is understood the first time he tells a seven-year-old boy to give up on his dreams. It's not a bad little scene, relatively speaking; it's sort of amusing and sort of sad at once. By the time he's delivered a near-identical speech to more or less every other major character, however, and watched them crumble, it gets hard to shake the feeling that he's just a spiteful asshole who gets off on making people cry. When the inevitable happy ending came around, therefore, I mostly found myself hoping that his girlfriend knew what she was letting herself in for.
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