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Tooth Fairy (G)
1 star
National release
IN Tooth Fairy, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays Derek Thompson, a thuggish minor-league ice-hockey player with a heart of gold – hello, script problems already – with the nickname of the Tooth Fairy. This comes from an incident where he knocked out an opponent’s front teeth.
When Thompson tries to tell his girlfriend’s coincidentally front-toothless young daughter there is no such thing as the lower-case tooth fairy, he suffers a peculiar cosmic punishment: being whisked to tooth-fairy training school in wings and a pink tutu. (Apparently his brutality on the ice is not an issue). Here the matronly boss – Julie Andrews – sentences him to two weeks of community service as a tooth fairy. He must return to his life and wait for addresses of freshly toothless children to arrive via BlackBerry so he can sneak into their homes aided by various magic aids, including shrinking paste and cat repellent, and leave money beneath their pillows.
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The film is directed by Michael Lembeck (The Santa Clause 2 and 3) and penned by six screenwriters (including the City Slickers team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) without flair or subtlety, while Johnson’s performance lives down to his name. It’s hard not to feel sorry for some of the distinguished supporting players reduced to appearing in this film; not just Andrews, but also Ashley Judd, who plays Thompson’s girlfriend, and an uncredited Billy Crystal (in a role seemingly modelled on Q in the Bond movies, handing Thompson gizmos that will help him out of dangerous scrapes).
I guess it’s possible some of the target audience – young children on their school holidays – may find this a harmless diversion, though quite what they’ll make of the US-oriented sporting references is another question. What parents will make of its peculiarly skewed value system, with its bizarre acceptance of sporting violence mixed with sentimentality, is another.
I found myself wondering how this project might have turned out as an animation. Most Hollywood family animations seem better developed than many of their live-action equivalents. There’s just too much money and effort at stake. You can’t just crank ‘em out: the apparent production method here.
