 • About the ratings • Write your own review • Back to main page By David Kronke Los Angeles Daily News Posted: May 2, 2003 In "The Lizzie McGuire Movie," the Disney Channel's popular 'tween heroine ventures to Rome, appropriate given the film's fairly Fellini-esque, surreal plotting. Some kids' shows attempt to appeal to parents with wry humor; on TV "Lizzie's" obvious gags are aimed strictly at kids, and it aspires to nothing more here. As on the show, occasional animated sequences pop up explaining what's going on in Lizzie's mind (conveying same via dialogue or facial expressions apparently being out of the question); it's the 'tween correlative to the dopey fantasy sequences that "Ally McBeal" ran into the ground. Fans of the show should be appeased; parents will consider sneaking into something -- anything -- playing in an adjacent theater. Here, Lizzie (Hilary Duff), as she often does, clumsily humiliates herself at her junior high's commencement ceremony, then embarks on a field trip to Rome with her impending high-school principal, the regimental Miss Ungermeyer (an intentionally grating Alex Borstein), where she's forced to room with her arch-enemy, Kate (Ashlie Brillault). Lizzie philosophizes that the trip represents her "chance to start over" -- start what over? Would an educator really trek halfway around the planet with 16 kids she's never even met, with no other chaperones? Even teensy amounts of thinking while sitting through "Lizzie" will result in dire frustration, as the film apparently takes place in Bizarro Rome, where common sense is strictly verboten. There, Lizzie meets a dreamy Italian teen pop idol (Yani Gellman) -- she's a dead ringer for his former singing and romantic partner, Isabella -- and plays hooky from the field trip to hang with him. As he puts the moves on Lizzie, he tells her he loves his ex, her doppelganger, "like a sister" -- ewww! He beseeches her to perform with him at a music-video awards program, while everyone around him accepts that Lizzie is the singer, even though she can't speak Italian and has an American accent (Duff's Italian accent while playing Isabella is pretty duff, too). Since montages fill time in movies just as capably as regular scenes without the nuisance of having to write dialogue, there are a lot of montages in "Lizzie," including not one but two trying-clothes-on sequences. This being Disney, it's somewhat shocking that the shopping montage has been omitted. More shocking, however, is the fact that this production was actually shot on location in Italy and got absolutely nothing of the spirit or sights of Rome (except, of course, in a quick bus-tour montage). Certainly, it's foolish to expect much from kids' films, but that should hardly be an excuse to create something as willfully inane and sloppy as "The Lizzie McGuire Movie." | ||||||||
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