The Princess Bride (1987)

Originally Reviewed

Sunday January 1, 2007

It must be inconceivable that I did not love this film as it seems the masses do, of course inconceivable usually turned out to be conceivable in this film, and those of you who have seen The Princess Bride know what I'm speaking of. This was my first viewing of the film, and I went into it with extremely high expectations seeing everyone seems to give it high marks and exclaims how classic it is. There even was a thread on the Rotten Tomatoes forums dedicated to this film with nothing but raves. One person jokingly posted they thought it was a 4/10 and people seemed to be genuinely shocked until they admitted they were only joking. Well this review is no joke, I genuinely wasn't impressed with this film, I didn't hate it, but don't think it lives up to the overwhelming hype it seems to be privy to.

The Princess Bride is a film that is presented in the form of a story being read to a young child. The story is of a young woman named Buttercup (horrible name for a person by the way) and her true love Westley. Westley leaves on a voyage, and later Buttercup learns that his ship was captured by pirates and he was killed. In her despair Buttercup vows she will never love again; but some things in life she can't control.

Five years later Buttercup is engaged to Prince Humperdinck, she doesn't love him but it is his right as the prince to choose whomever he desires to be his wife, and she was chosen. But as it turns out Humperdinck doesn't love Buttercup either, he's only using her as a pawn in a plan to start a war between two kingdoms. Humperdinck plans to kill Buttercup and make it appear she was murdered by another kingdom in order to start a war, but before he's able to marry her and carry out his plans she is kidnapped by a group of eccentric thieves.

Eventually she is rescued by the Dread Pirate Roberts (a Zorro wannabe) who turns out to be her love Westley. While Westley is able to rescue her from the thieves he's unable to save her from Humperdinck who catches up to them and imprisons Westley. With time now drawing short Westley must escape the clutches of Humperdinck and rescue Buttercup from impending doom!

I was quite disappointed with this film, with the high praise from practically everyone I expected some grand adventure with lots of action and lots of comedy, instead The Princess Bride ends up being extremely cheesy, barely funny and overall rather uneventful. While the story moves at a rapid pace half the time it seems to go absolutely nowhere, in fact it's actually rather limited in depth altogether. The characters are all pretty weak, the villain is a total wuss, and the ending was completely disappointing, almost a politically correct fairy tale ending as the villain is basically let go.

Now let me quickly explain my rating, which seems to go against the grain compared to everyone else. I rate a film largely on acting, story, flow, etc. If a film reigns supreme in all these categories and others it usually gets a high score, whether or not the re-watch-ability factor is high or not. But when a film, such as this one, fails to impress me much at all, re-watch-ability becomes an extremely high factor. The fact is I wouldn't watch this film again, nothing stood out to me and overall I wasn’t impressed or entertained with the end product. In the end, the hype of The Princess Bride is a mystery to me, in my book it's a mediocre highly forgettable fairy tale.  If you want a truly entertaining fairy tale adventure watch The Neverending Story, now there is a real classic. 

5/10