Reviews

Times - 4 stars
I haven’t been as delighted and surprised by an old-fashioned Disney tale since I was a child. Enchanted begins between the covers of a book. A fairytale princess warbles about discovering true love’s kiss to a ghastly chorus of twittering forest animals. The evil queen pushes Giselle down a wishing well before she can marry Prince Charming. And all of them, for one greedy reason or another, pop out of a pothole in Times Square, Manhattan. This is bliss.

Amy Adams, the confused princess, can’t understand why people want to rob or rape her. Her naivety about cars, traffic lights, and strangers at 4am in the pouring rain is not just fabulously naive, it’s totally precarious. She is plucked off the mean streets by a hunky divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey), who has a six-year-old daughter and a fiendishly needy girlfriend. Being a Disney princess with good manners, Adams can still muster the local wildlife to do her bidding when she sings. Sewer rats, cockroaches, flies, and pigeons clean up Dempsey’s Fifth Avenue flat and make breakfast the next morning.

At this point I realised that the film could do no wrong. I started crying when Adams waltzed through Central Park with a perfectly stressed Dempsey, who had no inkling why total strangers should start assembling a musical number around him. That kind of magic never knowingly touches real lives. Kevin Lima’s film does just that. Susan Sarandon is terrific as the Evil Queen; Timothy Spall pops up like a well-used wart; and James Marsden is the terrifically thick and handsome Prince.
PG, 107mins

James Christopher

Heart Radio 10/10
It’s absolutely brilliant and like nothing you'll have ever seen before. Both hilarious and heartwarming, it’s a modern Disney classic but the traditional feel of the films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are heavy influences. It’s not often that family films are laugh out loud funny but it’s packed with genuine deep belly laughs for both kids and adults. It’s the perfect family film for the festive season.

Simon Thompson

Time Out New York- 2 stars
We’ve seen this before: A lovely cartoon maiden, straight from Don Bluth’s sketch pads, sings while friendly animals scurry about. A dashing prince appears on the scene (“We shall be married in the morning!”), then the film’s villainess transports the lass to a place “where there are no happily-ever-afters.” Any Middle American will tell you that means New York, and our formerly animated young lady (Adams) is plunged into a live-action Horror City. When she calls for furry friends to help clean an apartment, it’s CGI rats and roaches that whistle while they work. For a split second, you wonder if someone slipped a Mickey into the House of Mouse’s water supply and made some joyously subversive gem while the brass was asleep.

No such luck. Despite the benign No-Tomorrowland Gotham our goody-two-shoes heroine has been thrust into, it’s still just Disney business as usual. Her pure, romantic demeanor wins over a cynical McDreamy lawyer (Dempsey). The clueless prince (Marsden) attacks midtown buses. Naturally, the movie’s evil stepmom (Sarandon)—apparently auditioning for a Broadway adaptation of Aelita: Queen of Mars—comes brandishing the requisite poison apples. And while no one expects the studio to slaughter its own cash cows by actually deconstructing fairy-tale mythology, this bland bedtime story doesn’t even offer an entertaining post-Shrek take on the original. Even Adams, gamely attacking her archetypal role with glee, can’t fight back the saccharine tide. For a movie filled with magical occurences, Enchanted commits a cardinal sin: It forgets to cast a spell on the audience.

Simon Fear

Rolling stone magazine- 3 stars
You might want to remember the name Amy Adams. It's star-is-born time for the Colorado Mormon, who won a supporting-actress Oscar nomination for 2005's Junebug, which few saw (dumb move). Enchanted has the makings of a supersize sugarcoated hit, and Adams is just the spicy princess you want to take home and PG-love. Not since Julie Andrews rode an umbrella to glory in Mary Poppins has Disney given us such a real-life doll.

Actually, Adams' Giselle starts off as a cartoon, a princess who finds her prince (James Marsden), only to have his bitch-queen mother (Susan Sarandon) banish her to hell. That would be Times Square, where the characters take on flesh and blood. OK, it's corny. Script contrivance, thy name is having Giselle take refuge in the Manhattan apartment of a McDreamy divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) and his young daughter (Rachel Covey), which really irks — they don't say "pisses off" in family films — his girlfriend (Idina Menzel). But Enchanted makes magic when Giselle, who also looks yummy in just a towel, redecorates his digs with the help of rats, pigeons and roaches. The terrific score is from Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. And X-Man Marsden (so good in Hairspray) is a hoot as the song-and-dance-man prince. Yet Adams is the wish your heart makes when you want a storybook princess for the ages. She's wicked good.

Peter Travers

Enchanted (2007) recieved 93% positive feedback on Rotten tomatoes.