In the cardboard kingdom of Genovia, the setting for the new feature-length fairy tale The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, the streets are as scrubbed of dirt and personality as a Disney theme park. A mythic European country where everyone speaks English accented by way of Britain, France and Brooklyn, Genovia is the adopted home of Princess Mia (Anne Hathaway), a onetime San Francisco teenager turned old-world pretender. Unlike Pinocchio, Mia doesn't hang her wish on just any star; she hangs it on the movie-made promise that every girl can find her inner princess and, like, you know, rule.
The story opens with Mia graduating from college (when we last saw her she was in high school) and zipping off to Genovia, which her grandmother, Queen Clarisse Renaldi (Julie Andrews), hopes she will govern someday soon.
As in the original Princess Diaries, much of the putative comedy involves the free-spirited Mia working in gentle, contrapuntal harmony with her veddy, veddy proper grandmother. Because the ugly duckling has already molted into a swan, however, the plot this time around hinges on some minor palace intrigue and romances with two blow-dried suitors who take turns holding the royal hand while keeping a safe distance from the royal chastity.
In between the cooing and wooing, the pratfalls and product placements, Hathaway and Andrews flash smiles of such dazzling wattage they could carry California through its next energy crisis.
The Princess Diaries 2 was directed by Garry Marshall, who has been selling wish-fulfillment fantasies for years, most notably in Pretty Woman and in the first Princess Diaries movie. Marshall, whose place in pop-culture heaven was secured long ago by television comedies like The Dick Van Dyke Show, on which he served as a writer, is not much of a film director. Depending on the budget, his movies look either cheap (like this one) or studio slick (Pretty Woman), and tend to have the same flat, presentational visual style that's familiar from most sitcoms.
Built on vintage and newly minted cliches, Shonda Rhimes's script combines a classic storybook scenario with the usual self-help uplift. After undergoing a radical makeover in the first Princess movie, Anne has metamorphosed into a self-
possessed young woman. She knows how to walk in high heels, iron the frizz out of her hair, etc.
True, her sexuality comes across as weirdly underdeveloped, closer to that of the preadolescents who constitute this G-rated movie's core audience, than that of most typical college graduates. But that's in keeping with the character whose appeal is largely predicated on being essentially unremarkable in every respect in looks, intelligence, personality and that most dubious of designated female traits, niceness.
There's nothing wrong with being nice if it means giving succor to the poor and being kind to animals, but there's something unsettling about a character as bland, mushy and fiber-free as soggy corn flakes.
Once upon a different time, Mia might have found her truest self by hanging out with the soulfully truculent adolescent girls in Ghost World. Instead, Andrews whisked in with a face frozen in do-re-mi beatitude and carried Mia off to a world where every unruly hair and thought is as smoothed down as the grass on a windswept Bavarian mountain.
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