Brendan Fraser has been keeping himself busy during the last few years with "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "The Mummy 3" and this movie all coming out within the same year (Inkheart was beginning of '09 but whatever) we got to see a lot of him. To be honest he plays a pretty similar character in most of his movies and although he's not the best actor and doesn't star in the most amazing movies he's another one of those guys that just seems really genuine and is enjoyable to watch.
Inkheart, although it failed to make the big box-office bucks, is the best of the, what I like to call, 08-09 Brendan Fraser trilogy.
Its about this guy who, when he reads books out loud, transports the characters from the book into the real world. So he reads the book "Inkheart" and the bad guys in the book manage to escape. They decide that they like the real world and want to take it over. The story focuses on Brendan Fraser and his daughter (who is British for some reason) travelling the world looking for the seemlingly uber-rare copies of the Inkheart book so that they may somehow send the bad guys back to their world. Along the way they are joined by a character from the book that can manipulate fire, a crazy aunt and the author of the Inkheart book himself, who's comments about his own characters are often quite amusing.
The movie is filled with characters and references from fantasy books: Unicorns, Minotaurs, a bandit from "Arabian Nights", flying monkeys and Toto from the Wizard of OZ have all been released from their books and all eventually help the heroes out in defeating the vilains.
The main bad guy character is played by Andy Serkis (aka Gollum motion capture guy from LOTR) and he is awesome as the evil yet cowardly villain.
The first thing I noticed in this movie was how well it used CGI. They used an actual trained ferret as the pet of one of the character instead of using a CGI ferret and I'm so glad they did. CGI animals in movie are never realistic at its very distracting when you see the obviously fake animal running around everywhere. The CGI fire one of the characters throw around looks very good and so does the giant smoke monster. As seen in the poster.
The story isn't super deep and the pacing is slightly off during a lot of the movie. Some scenes really bothered me as well. For example at some point a girl is trapped behind some bars and can't escape, the problem is the bars are 3 feet apart, she can obviously pass between them yet she doesn't. Another problem I had was with the fire manipulator character who kept running away and coming back. Its like he doesn't want to help the others but he's a good guy so he has to help... his motivation is all over the place and although I like Paul Bettany and throwing fire is cool, that character is just really unlikeable.
Personally I think its worth seeing the movie just to watch the british actors like Andy Serkis, Helen Miren (who plays the crazy aunt) and Jim Broadbent (the author, soon to play Horace Slughorn in Harry Potter.) playing these really crazy characters. I mean you get to see the woman who played the Queen of England riding a freaking motorcycle. Awww yeahh!
-BeaverMoose
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