Beastly

Rating: PG-13

Brought to you by OBS staff member Annabell Cadiz

*Contains spoilers*

Beastly is about a wealthy teen named Kyle Kingsbury (Alex Pettyfer). He is gorgeous, pompous, and completely full of himself. Kyle believes only outside beauty matters until a fellow schoolmate, Kendra who is a goth dressing girl, embarrasses him in class one day. Kyle sets out to seek revenge against Kendra and asks her to be his date for the school dance. Kendra accepts even though she suspects him but wants to see if Kyle will end up proving her young. Once at the dance, Kyle embarrasses her in front of everyone there, mocking her for actually believing he would ever ask a girl like her out. Kendra reveals herself to be a witch and places a curse on Kyle turning away all his beauty and tells him he only has a year to find someone to love him or the spell will never be broken.

Kyle goes into exile, his father placing him within a house to live on his own along with the nanny, Zola, (Lisa Gay Hamilton) he’s had since he was a child. Kyle also hires a blind tutor, Will, (Neil Patrick Harris) who also resides inside the home with him. His nanny and tutor being his only companions. Kyle spends most nights running around the streets in the dark and one night, he happens upon Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens). She gets attacked by two thugs while trying to help her drug addict father. Lindy’s father ends up killing one of the thugs and Kyle uses his cell phone to take pictures of the crime scene. He uses it leverage to have Lindy forcibly moved into his home so he can try to court her to fall in love with him.

Lindy’s moves in, not too happy with having to live with people she’s never met before and being dragged away from her life. Kyle, under the disguise of Hunter, sets out on his journey to build a romance with her and free himself from his curse.

Since last year, in July, when this movie was announced to be coming out in theaters I have been anxiously awaiting it’s arrival. I absolutely LOVED the book! And was VERY excited it had been adapted into a movie . . . until I saw it.

The story was bland as was the dialogue. There were more montage scenes than actual action. The scenes were painfully dragged out and made the pacing of the movie slow to the point you actually start to feel bored. It was hard to stay drawn into the movie and the characters at certain points because it was lacking any real climax.

Alex Pettyfer did a pretty good job in the movie. He did a great job transforming from the annoying, full of himself Kyle Kingsbury to the broken and lost beast seeking to understand what matters in life. Alex was wonderful in his humor and complete inability at understanding how women work. I just wished he who have been transformed to made to look more like an actual beast like had happened in the book. For the most part, he still looked like a pretty guy with a bunch of crazy tattoos inked around his body.

Mary-Kate Olsen was fantastic as the evil enchantress. She was quirky and dark. I was pleasantly surprised by her and enjoyed watching her performance. There were times I felt like she was walking through a movie as if on a runway in a modeling show though. She could have been less glam-ed up than she.

Vanessa Hudges was not as impressive as I would have thought. Her character was very flat throughout the movie, and seemed devoid of personality. I got bored a few times with her and found it hard to focus on her character.

If you are a fan of the book, you may want to wait for the DVD of the movie to be released before you head out to watch it. And don’t go in expecting to be wowed. The movie adaptation of the book is no where near as good as the movie (as usually happens). If you haven’t read the book, this is a pretty decent chick-flick type of movie that’s good to watch with some girlfriends and a bowl of popcorn.

Overall, Beastly was a pretty decent movie. There are aspects of the movie I had very much enjoyed.

Director: Daniel Barnz

Running Time: 86 minutes

Rating: 7/10