Film review: Inkheart characters come to life!

Dec 24 2008 by Richard Evans, North Wales Weekly News

FAMILY adventure Inkheart is the perfect festive movie for all the family – but don’t expect anything new.

When Mo (Brendan Fraser) reads aloud from books his words bring the story characters to life – this causes problems for his family when the evil characters of the novel spring from the book, while at the same time Mo’s wife, Teresa (Sienna Guillory) becomes trapped in the paperback!

Escaping from the pages of Inkheart the wicked Capricorn (Andy Serkis) then attempts to force Mo and his daughter Meggie (Eliza Bennett) into helping him bring to life the book’s other terrible characters, including his monstrous assassin, The Shadow. Paul Bettany also makes an appearance as fire juggler, Dustfinger, who unlike the other characters in the book is desperate to return to his life in the pages of Inkheart.

If you’ve seen Stardust, The Spiderwick Chronicles or The Golden Compass then you get the picture. Since Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia all made it onto the silver screen, Hollywood seems determined to make every children’s book ever written into a movie – but the kids won’t care and neither will you for an hour and a half – a magical movie.

7/10