Two Torches (Out of Five)

Full disclosure: I didn’t like Inkheart, the book. Yes, it’s enormously popular, a break-out world-wide hit, translated into 37 languages. But from the start, it seemed to me to be one of those children’s books that prides itself on being enormously clever, but just isn’t.

Whenever Mo, a “silvertongue,” reads aloud from a book, the characters literally come alive. Yes, yes, I get it: it’s a metaphor for how the characters in certain books can be unsettlingly “real,” and how reading books aloud can make them even more so.

From the start, I found this idea trite and annoying. But what really frustrated me with the story was that the central conceit was so riddled with logical inconsistencies: if characters from the real world traded places with those in fictional ones, why didn’t those real characters show up in the resulting books? If the Silvertongue power was so unpredictable, why wasn’t Capricorn worried about being sucked into some other book? And if Mo was so desperate to get his hands on another copy of Inkheart, the book in question, why didn’t he simply write that down on a piece of paper and read it aloud (or look it up on Amazon)?

I could go on.

Inkheart, the new movie version of the book starring Brendan Fraser, is a surprisingly faithful adaptation—although perhaps that’s not too surprising given that author Cornelia Funke is listed as one of the producers.

In other words, the movie brings to life all the logical inconsistencies of the book.

But logical inconsistencies are the least of this movie’s problems. If the characters in Inkheart, the book inside the book, are so full of life, the characters in this movie are as flat as the paper they were first written on. Plucky Meggie—an aspiring writer, naturally–is a cliché, Aunt Elinor even more so, and Mo is so passive as to be absolutely infuriating.

And don’t get me started on the plot problems, and the cheat of a way that Meggie saves the day in the end. And why the hell did Farid and Dustfinger set the castle on fire anyway?

The movie’s only worthwhile elements are its spectacular real-world European settings, and the fact that it finally offers Lord of the Ring’s Andy Serkis (Gollum) a decent live-action role (as Capricorn).

But this isn’t nearly enough to make this stinker worth sitting through.