The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

Garry Marshall's "The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement" is the most enthusiastically G-rated movie to hit theaters this year. It's chirpy and naïve and sunny, existing in the sort of harmless, glimmering neverland that could exist only in fairy tales.

It's not for me, but then it's not meant to be for me. It's for pre-teen girls who long for a tiara, a mansion and a cute boy, which is fair enough. At my screening, the majority of its target audience seemed to like it, which those eager to see it should know. Still, for those of us who have been bonged over the head with this scepter one too many times before, it's difficult to embrace "Princess Diaries 2" when so many similar, better movies have proceeded it.

The likable leads--Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrew--do their best to lift this number two out of the toilet, but Marshall makes it tough to get beyond the cliches and the sloppy direction when you know that both could have been erased had he put more effort into the movie.

All over this film is a malaise of laziness that shows--from the cheap, cheesy cardboard sets that look shaky at best to the safe, predictable lessons in life dealt to clumsy Princess Mia (Hathaway).

Now fresh out of college, Mia's dilemma isn't her looks. Instead, she must find a man to marry within 30 days or she won't be able to succeed her grandmother, Queen Clarisse (Andrews), in becoming queen of fictional Genovia.

If Mia can't find a suitable suitor, the throne will go to hunky Prince Nicholas (Chris Pine), a smoldering, doe-eyed dreamboat who has a crush on Mia (and vice versa), though his conniving uncle, Viscount Mabrey (John Rhys-Davies), is working hard to make certain the two don't bond so Nicholas can become king. What will bloom between prince and princess? Who can say?

Plenty can say--the writing is all over the castle in this movie. Marshall and his screenwriters, Shonda Rhimes and Gina Wendkos, depend on their young audience's lack of moviegoing experience to help sell their repackaged blandness.

Hathaway is a beauty and she deserves better, but her pratfalls and blunders don't suit her nearly as well here as they did in the first film; she's ready to move on and it shows. Andrews, on the other hand, is apparently game for anything--even mattress surfing, at one point, and singing with Raven Simone, of all people, at another point. Andrews is so graceful, she seems impervious to her own slumming, sailing through it all in spite of being saddled with the sort of dialogue that would fell a von Trapp: "Nepotism belongs in the arts, my dear, not plumbing."

There's some insight. But long before that clunker stops this movie cold, some will wish the film's own pipes had been cleaned.

Grade: C