What A Girl Wants

A fairytale for 12-year-old girls whose interests don't extend far beyond cute boys and "like, totally, being a princess," What A Girl Wants is a tiresome, exceedingly formulaic teen genre picture which shows no ambition to do anything remotely interesting with its strained take on the old Cinderella chestnut. The intensely annoying Amanda Bynes plays Daphne, a 17-year-old girl who is facing what can only be described as a mid-teenage crisis. Desperate to get to know the father she has never met, she leaves her quasi-bohemian mother (Kelly Preston) and heads off to London to try and establish relations with daddy dearest. Thing is, the dad (Colin Firth) is a Lord (no less), doesn't know she exists, and is in the process of running for office. Something which his fiancee (Anna Chancellor) and future stepdaughter (Christina Cole) are desperate for him to achieve as it will cement their standing in the upper echelons of British class society. But such stuffy company is certainly no place for a brash, spunky American chick who just, you know, wants to have some, like, fun, okay?

Nor it is any place for any self-respecting adult on nodding terms with the concept of taste. Indeed, What A Girl Wants is so utterly banal and cliche ridden that it becomes an exercise in endurance after the first 15 minutes. Once again, and challenging Hugh Grant for the franchise on bumbling depictions of perversely inarticulate, stuffy British upper class buffoons, Colin Firth wheels out another standard performance. Yet his journeyman pro turn is a relief in comparison to the brash excitability of Bynes.