‘Stardust’ fails to put shine in fantasy tale from novel

One of the problems is that the young leads don’t do a
colorful job of acting.

By ROBERT W. BUTLER

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

“Stardust” feels like “The Princess Bride” on Prozac.

One of those fantasy quests that Hollywood is so hot for at the moment, this screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s illustrated novel has been so overproduced and underthought that whatever charm and whimsy it once may have possessed has been squeezed out.

It even makes Claire Danes irritating.

A prologue set in what looks like the 1870s introduces us to a quaint Brit village and the stone wall that separates it from the magical kingdom of Stormhold. A young villager crosses the wall and meets a beautiful young woman. They produce a son who is reared here in the “real” world.

Years later the boy, named Tristran and played by Charlie Cox, is smitten by a vain local beauty (Sienna Miller). He vows to prove his love by finding a falling star and returning with it. When a meteor comes down in Stormhold, Tristran eludes the guard at the wall (David Kelly), climbs over and begins his quest.

The falling star is no mere lump of space debris. It’s actually a pretty young woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes) who awakens in the middle of a blackened crater and desperately requires a champion to see her to safety. That would be our boy Tristran.

The prophecy

In the meantime, the star’s arrival has set in motion an ancient prophecy.

The king of Stormhold (Peter O’Toole) dies, leaving his murderous sons to vie for the throne. One of “Stardust’s” running jokes is that the maimed ghosts of these fratricidal victims keep hovering around the surviving sibling (Jason Flemyng), getting in his way as he attempts to grab Yvaine for himself.

And then there’s currently beautiful Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), an evil sorceress who with her two vile sisters wants to sacrifice Yvaine, thus reversing their imminent slide into wrinkled hagdom.

There’s also some business about a black candle with magical properties that doesn’t make much sense.

Along the way Tristran and Yvaine elude their pursuers, have close calls and encounter curious denizens of Stormhold. Such as Captain Shakespeare (Robert DeNiro), a sky pirate whose galleon soars through the clouds and whose aggressively macho posturing conceals a more than seemly love of his fellow man. Ricky Gervais plays a con artist named Ferdy the Fence — he’s costumed like a big leprechaun and saddled with some really lame jokes.

Various failures

None of this is particularly clever or original, and director Matthew Vaughan (who made his feature debut a couple of years back with the crime thriller “Layer Cake”) evidently lacks the light touch required by fantasy. References to the work of Terry Gilliam and the Monty Python only highlight how wan “Stardust” is. Instead of floating delicately, the movie clomps along like a peasant after a hard day in the fields.

The biggest drawback, though, is that young stars Cox and Danes are insufferably colorless. Automatons could have given these performances.

“Stardust” may amuse the small fry. All else are advised to cross the wall at their own peril.