The Princess Diaries (Wide Screen) > Reviews > Dad might want to put a shelf up while this is on

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Indifferent to it
Story	Very ordinary
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Unmemorable
How does it compare to similar films?	Unmemorable

Advantages:	Some watchable comedy, reasobnable performances
Disadvantages:	Ridiculous storyboard

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I watched this film with my nine year old niece who clearly adored it. It is fundamentally Disney feel-good pap but is watchably comic enoughof the time to avoid the need to grip the sick bucket all the way through. My three year old daughter also enjoyed it in passing, though she couldn't concentrate all the way through.

The film was mde in 2001, and there is now a sequel.

The main character, Mia, opens the film as a bright but gawky schoolgirl in San Francisco who is uncool in the high school environment and so nervous of speaking in public she throws up in the middle of a school debate. Played by teen actress Anne Hathaway, we witness her transformation into glamourous princess when she discovers her father was Prince of a small European country.

Her grandmother the Queen (Julie Andrews) devotes time and effort to coaching her to take the throne so she herself can abdicate, and she gradually changes into an A list princess who attracts media attention and all the A list boys she can handle.

Julie Andrews does a competent job of being regal, despite the ludicrous premise that she didn't even tell her grandaughter of her heritage until she was 15. Some cute and touching scenes develop as the relationship between teenager and monarch grows closer and Hathaway porvides some nice comic moments as she clumsily struggles to learn the elegance and poise required of her in her new role.

Add a few cutesy moral lessons, a saleable CD soundtrack, a pretty frock and more than one tiara and you have all the ingredients to keep a nine year old girl perfectly happy. Disney knew this.

It's a pre-teen film really. They'd love it. Being pre-menopausal it doesn't have quite the same effect on me, but it's wholesome, decent, harmless fun. Utterly ludicrous, especially as a Brit, where we feel we know a bit more about European royalty than the average Disney executive - the very idea that a Queen of a small European monarchy would willingly abdicate in favour of a 15 year old American school girl who can't tell her garter from her Order of the Garter requires considerable suspension of belief. Hector Elizondo does a great job as Mia's bodyguard, though why he continued wearing a leather jacket at a black tie ball is incomprehensible.

Heather Matarazzo plays Mia's misfit best friend Lilly who struggles to cope with the emerging butterfly, and Mia has a mother too who has inexplicably failed to mention the small point that her father was a prince. His family name is Renaldi, which of course sounds nothing like Prince Rainier Grimaldi at all.

The DVD comes with deleted scenes, interviews with the stars and a few other random extras which my niece has watched over and over and over again, so in my opinion it was worth including them. She can't get enough of this film, so deleted scenes filled her with joy. I did have to go and make a cup of tea hile she watched them though....

In summary, this is watchable once if you are over 16, and the best film ever made if you are a girl of about 10. If you are a bloke, then frankly, I'd go and watch Arsenal play instead.