Rent Beastly (2010)

Beastly review by Alyse Garner - Cinema Paradiso

Beastly is the 2011 live action re-imagining of the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast, made most famous by the Walt Disney corporation in 1991. Twenty years later this film seems to be an attempt to capture a new audience for the tale and by its overly sentimental and romantic tone one can only assume that audience is that of melodramatic teenage girls.

The film centers on handsome, popular and self-involved high school boy Kyle (Alex Pettyfer) who is cursed after humiliating a female school colleague. His appearance is transformed into that of someone with significant skin damage and facial deformity and he will stay that way forever unless he can find someone who loves him in less than a year.

Under the guise of rich recluse Hunter, Kyle takes in fellow student Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens) in order to save her from the people who are perusing her father for his unpaid drug bills. Accompanied by his Jamaican maid and blind tutor Hunter woes Lindy who seeing his changing heart falls for him.

The film is predictable and attempts to place a dark veil over the fairy tale whilst in turn dealing with the somewhat contrived subject of many teenage romance films, inner beauty. The film appears to be deep and mournful, as is the tradition of film’s such as The Twilight Series yet personally I found it pretentious and overly melodramatic, not to mention the horrendous slights it puts against the disabled community. However I imagine that many a hormonal teenage girl will have been moved considerably by the change in the main characters and the love that grows between them.