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Happily
N'Ever After
In this animated feature,
George Carlin stars as The Wizard – a powerful figure who
ensures that all of
the fairy tales end as they should, with good trumping evil, the prince
getting
the right girl, etc. One
day, just
before the big ball, where the Prince (Patrick Warburton) is supposed
to fall
in love with Cinderella (also known as Ella in this movie, and voiced
by Sarah
Michelle Gellar), The Wizard goes on a quick vacation, leaving his
lackeys,
Munk (Wallace Shawn) and Mambo (Andy Dick) in charge.
Of course,
Cinderella’s evil
stepmother, Frieda (Sigourney Weaver), finds out the two screw up
sidekicks are
temporarily in charge, and decides to grab The Wizard’s all
powerful magical
staff from them (at least buy him dinner first).
Once she does, Frieda fixes it so all of the
fairy tale villains start to win, and Ella has to join forces with
Munk, Mambo,
and one of the Prince’s servants, Rick (Freddie Prinze, Jr.),
to find the
handsome prince with hopes he can defeat the evil stepmother, ogres,
wolves,
witches and more. Little
does she know,
the prince is a dolt, and Rick wants to be much more than just friends
with our
fair maiden.
Will Frieda be
defeated? Will Rick
win the heart of
Ella? Do they call
her Ella in some sort
of weird pact with Disney to avoid copyright violations and a nasty
lawsuit
where Disney sues them back into the Stone Age?
Happily
N’Ever After clearly
is the B-level of animated fare, including B-level animation, B-level
stars
providing voices, B-level stories and B-level dialogue.
Director Paul Bolger and writer Robert
Moreland are too busy trying to be snarky to make an interesting movie. The story is beyond
extremely thin as the
characters wander around with no plan, and the action is thrown in to
wake you
up with some loud noises instead of trying to advance the plot.
Worst of all, Moreland
doesn’t come up with any dialogue or character behavior you
could consider
smart and witty, and never strives to reach the levels of fun and
intelligence
you find in movies like Shrek and
The
Incredibles. Instead,
he and Bolger try to make our
narrator Rick sound too cool for words, while the words he and the
other
characters speak are never clever, and barely ever funny. Instead of having some fun
twisting around
the behavior of cherished characters who are easy targets for
lampooning,
Moreland and Bolger just dumb them down, like the Seven Dwarfs being
morphed
into Southern militia nutjobs.
Not only did I find it
boring, but the theater was full of little kids who didn’t
laugh that much
either. The only
real laugh I had was
when I started think Frieda the Evil Stepmother was supposed to look
like an
over-botoxed Sharon Stone, but I have a feeling that wasn’t
intentional. Happily
N’Ever After has very little chance
of making any of you happy if you go to see it.
½
Waffle (Out
Of 4)
Happily
N'Ever After is rated PG for some mild action and
rude humor
Copyright
2007 - WaffleMovies.com
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